Gilla gris is a three-year digital marketing campaign with the mission of increasing the status of pork meat among younger consumers in Sweden – for the days of the week when people choose to include meat in their cooking.
Swedish Meat partnered up with the Danish Agriculture and Food Council and applied to the European Union for a so-called multi program funding for the promotion of agricultural products.
Miltton was chosen as the project’s communications partner. Having several vegetarians and flexitarians in the project group at Miltton, we were very clear with the fact that we neither wanted, nor could work for increased meat consumption. Instead, our recommendation became to take up the fight with beef, lamb and chicken for the days during the week when people actually chose to include meat in their cooking.
Swedish Meat and their constituent members within the pork industry had been facing a rapid decline in the consumption of pork meat, especially among younger consumers during the past 10 to 15 years. Young people today eat less meat in general and pork in particular.
Studies show that pork is perceived as cheap, low-status and associated with old fashioned recipes. There are also considerably fewer recipes online with pork compared to other meats. Our conclusion was that we needed to move away from low status pig (fläsk) to high status pork (gris).
The campaign strategy is to build on already existing food trends and engage the target group with the help of influencers and chefs on the channels where young people today go to for inspiration and knowledge, namely Google, Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. We signed 6 high profile influencers and chefs for the first year (2019) and established proprietary campaign channels on all relevant SoMe channels.
During the first six months of the campaign, we carried out over 100 updates on the proprietary campaign channels, published our own 72 new recipes and had our influencers and chefs publish an additional 38 recipes. During the first six months, the campaign reached 1.39M people and received over 18M impressions on Facebook and Instagram. The website had over 330,000 unique visitors and Pinterest over 1.6M views. In addition, through the influencer’s channels (Instagram and YouTube), the campaign reached approx. 500,000 within the target group.
The campaign continues, and we are launching over 100 new recipes this year. You can follow the campaign at @gillagris.