'Compleating' Campaign

Published on January 9, 2020

For the first Love Food Hate Waste (LFHW) campaign 'moment' of 2019, the focus was on getting our target audience to start eating all parts of their food, and stop throwing away things like crusts, peels, bread ends, leaves and stems etc. Similar to the fashionable 'root to leaf' or nose to tail' eating trends endorsed by chefs, we set out to create a trend around 'eating the whole thing', and came up with the concept of 'complete eating' = 'Compleating'. We narrowed our target audience for this campaign in order to target more effectively, and chose to focus on the younger end of our core age group, 18-24 year olds, who we know from our research are less likely to eat things like potato peels and bread ends than all other age groups.

We took a different approach to this campaign by creating more of the campaign in house, and then working with influencers and media giant LADbible to get creative messages out direct to our audiences straight from the messengers they already really engage with. The core assets we created were bright, clear and playful and went down really well with our partners and audiences alike. Working with LADbible – who are followed by around half of the UK's 18-24 year old audience (who this campaign was targeted at) – was a big part of this campaign's success. The LADbible Facebook article about Compleating reached just under 1 million people (most of these would be in our 18-24 UK target audience), and a FOODbible video created was in the top 35 most viewed Facebook videos in the UK during the campaign period. The campaign had a total reach of over 11 million, and online engagement was very strong, with 74,000 likes and 21,00 active engagements, including comments and shares. We also saw an increase of followers on our LFHW Instagram account of 30%. We were pleased that local authorities got behind the campaign strongly, with Luton Council even rebranding their refuse trucks with the Compleating imagery and messaging. What we learned from this activity was that this theme resonated quite widely – it was relevant to everyone and broad enough that it inspired lots of different ideas for partners to deliver such as recipes, competitions, newsletters and digital content. We got great feedback on the strong visuals which seems pretty universally usable. A longer campaign period (10 weeks rather than 4 weeks) and broad theme gave partners a better opportunity to get involved, and partner feedback was really positive about the resources themselves. A request was made to make them editable/co-brandable in future as this was seen as a barrier to uptake by a number of partners. TRIBE (a site that connects brands with social media influencers) proved a very useful and cost effective platform for engaging with microinfluencers, who in turn delivered our best ever engagement rates with their committed audiences. The halo effect of the activity on social media lead to some great increase in different interest groups we haven't seen before on LFHW.com. Ultimately, this campaign aimed to promote sustainable consumption to consumers through encouraging them to waste less food.