Campbell Soup Co., Meijer Are Local Football Partners

Camden, N.J. — When a cross-functional team from Campbell Soup Co. got together with some of Meijer’s sales and marketing leaders to discuss the fall 2015 selling season, their thoughts turned to football. “We identified several areas of opportunity, one being that football was a fabric of Meijer shoppers’ lives,” says Douglas Krauss, customer business manager of e-commerce, Campbell Soup Co. “Where their stores are located in the Midwest, they’re not just fans of NFL football, but are also big fans of college and high school football, too.”Because both the Campbell’s Chunky soup brand and Meijer had existing NFL relationships, that avenue seemed the best one to explore for a football-focused partnership. Chunky is the second-longest-tenured NFL corporate partner. Its “Mama’s Boy” commercials featuring players such as Reggie White, Donovan McNabb, Michael Strahan and Richard Sherman have been an advertising staple since 1997. “Coming off of that, Chunky had a strategy activating strongly in local markets. We wanted to bring that to a larger scale,” says Chris Mann, a director at Dallas-based Genesco Sports Enterprises, Chunky’s sports marketing agency. “Meijer was a really great customer for that because they went across five different NFL markets.”Chunky and Meijer partnered locally with five teams, with one player from each team participating in what would become the Chunky “Craveman” campaign: Green Bay Packers (Eddie Lacy), Chicago Bears (Matt Forte), Indianapolis Colts (Coby Fleener), Cincinnati Bengals (Andy Dalton) and Detroit Lions (Eric Ebron). “Working with those guys – a good mix of veterans and up-and-coming guys – really set us apart as far as what we could offer digital content-wise,” Mann says.By using different players, Chunky could also tie each to a specific flavor of soup that they craved, giving Chunky the opportunity to highlight some of its heartier, more differentiated flavors. These included “hearty pizza with sausage & pepperoni,” “sirloin burger with country vegetables,” “pub style chicken pot pie,” “beer-n-cheese with beef & bacon,” and “BBQ seasoned pork.”“A lot of our national work had been around one singular flavor or a couple of flavors,” says Abby Elu, marketing manager, Campbell Soup Co. “This way, we were able to focus on different flavors with these guys calling attention to the varieties that maybe don’t get as much attention as they should.”A sweepstakes gave contestants the ability to enter after buying Chunky soup at their local Meijer store. Prizes included a “Craveman Cave,” gift cards, game tickets and signed mini-helmets. The “man cave” concept helped reinforce the idea that Meijer’s big-box stores can provide everything you need for game day, from food to chairs to NFL merchandise to televisions.The partners launched a promotional website (ChunkyCraveman.com) in September 2015 that hosted video content, player content, the sweepstakes entry and game-day recipes. Meijer also promoted the campaign on its website as well as through targeted emails to its customers. And the five participating NFL players promoted the campaign socially via their Instagram and Twitter sites, reaching more than 1.4 million followers. They shared video content such as GIFs of the players dancing and a blooper reel. “It was just about creating content that they could organically share and link to the microsite, and be excited about it, instead of feeling like they’re just pitching soup,” Mann says.A separate Twitter-exclusive sweepstakes in each of the local markets gave fans a chance to win a meet-and-greet with the players. Ten winners in each market went to the local NFL stadium on a weekday in December for a full dinner and short “chalk talk” with the player, receiving autographs from and photos with him. The winners also sang the local team’s fight song, and videos of the performances were posted on the Chunky Twitter account.The campaign began in October and ran through the NFL season. In stores, the campaign was promoted throughout October through an endcap display and floor graphics, and during the first two weeks of October with an entry shroud. The content on the microsite was updated through the football season, and additional display support was added in January leading up to Super Bowl 50.Campbell Soup Co. and Meijer will define success for the campaign using metrics that include sales, category share growth for Chunky at Meijer, and impressions delivered. The effort represented Chunky’s largest-scale local NFL activation to date. “One of our strategies from a Chunky perspective is to be able to activate our national efforts at a local level and really bring the spirit and the passion of the NFL into those markets and tie that back to Chunky,” Elu says. “This is a great visualization of that strategy and how it can work successfully with our retailers. We are looking at how we do that with more partners in our next fiscal.”Agency partners for the campaign included The Mars Agency, Southfield, Michigan, which developed all of the online and in-store creative.