MERCHANT GOURMET
Normalise Pulses & Grains
Merchant Gourmet appointed us to develop a five year brand strategy on how MG can widen consumer appeal and frequency of purchase of its pulses, grains and chestnuts products, and ultimately grow revenues beyond £30m by 2020. At a time when healthy eating has never been so “on trend,” our research showed that we needed to re-position Merchant Gourmet as the brand that deeply understands the consumer, and offers tasty meal choices that can be purchased throughout the year, not just at Christmas.
Client /
Leathams
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Role /
Design Director
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Agency /
Worth
Year /
2018
“We’ve spent many years thinking about how we can take Merchant Gourmet to the masses and Grain & Graze allows us to communicate with a wider audience and to make Merchant Gourmet really exciting and I’m thrilled to finally get this (Grain & Graze) away, it’s really fantastic.”
Clive Moxham,
Group Commercial Director, Leathams
Pop-up activation
From design brief to delivery, our teams managed to build the entire Grain & Graze brand in less than four weeks! Our team covered everything from recruiting the perfect head chef to run the Grain & Graze kitchen, to installing a data driven operations system, to local promotions and delivering the best customer service. We even tried and tested the menu.
Product, packaging and point of sale
One of the first things to review was the product and the packaging; our detailed insight sessions identified a number of opportunities to make the product stand out more on-shelf, as well as the opportunity to launch new products. So in line with our deep test and learn, we tried several things including experimenting with several new packaging variants in Grain & Graze which reinforced Merchant Gourmet’s healthy eating credentials. We’ve also created a range of new products which have been robustly consumer researched and tested in the pop-up. They went down so well with the public that Merchant Gourmets food science team are in the process of developing several new lines for market. We’ve also developed a number of new POS and packaging designs which reinforce the great tasting recipes and MG’s health credentials way harder. Watch this space for more MG products on our shelf’s this year.
Retail engagement
Worth worked with the Merchant Gourmet’s retail sales team to design and build the pulses and grains fixture of the future that will reposition Merchant Gourmet instore. We housed this within the pop-up restaurant creating a brand immersion room to engage with high profile retailers and allowed us to sell this vision. It’s been an outright success and has led to significant conversations with several retailers including one hugely exciting development which will be announced in the coming weeks.
PR
For a brand with many avid users, our biggest challenge was that not enough people had heard about the brand. So we created an awareness plan that would be rolled out to increase Merchant Gourmet brand awareness, and would create a series of different seasonal recipes and health stories designed to increase frequency of purchase of Merchant Gourmet. We kicked off our campaign with an immersive launch party and have been holding workshops with bloggers and key titles over the last three months to educate them about the brand, the products and the health message which, to date, had not been heroed.
Digital and media
In order to significantly increase brand awareness our digital and media strategy combined out of home advertising, a multi-platform partnership with The Times, an array of innovative animated content and a strategic campaign to increase the MG social community by 20%. Ebitt planned very targeted activity that enabled Merchant Gourmet to successfully engage with their two focussed consumer profiles.
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Website build and bot creation
Our web team re-worked Merchant Gourmet’s website, making it easier to navigate and more effective, essentially making it more attractive to consumers leading to increased viewer dwell time. We also improved SEO by integrating the social media streams. Currently their page views are up by 31%. Lastly we created GrainBot, Merchant Gourmet’s very own chatbot. This is an easy to use, forward thinking service, powered by rules and artificial intelligence that provides an interactive platform for Merchant Gourmet consumers via Facebook Messenger.
Results
We are only three months into a five year journey but the results have been fantastic. We have reached millions of new consumers and we have had higher level conversations with our retailers. It’s very early days but the signs are good.
