Hello, hello, how's everybody? Are you enjoying so far? Woo! Cool.
So, hello, welcome. Today we're here to talk about creativity and mayonnaise. Yeah. I know. So my name is João Brum.
I'm the Senior Marketing Manager for Helmhans. And I'm here with a friend. And I'm Jamie Cordwell. I'm Global Executive Creative Director at Edelman London. We've actually got...
surprisingly a lot to talk about in 20 minutes about mayonnaise and creativity so I think we probably better kick it off. Let's get it going, let's get it going. So show of hands here, so how many of you know the brand Helmhans first of all? Okay, good news. So we're doing a good job on brand awareness at least here.
So as many of you might know, Helmhans is a big brand. It's actually the global leader in the category of mayonnaise, mostly in the Western Hemisphere but mostly because the Eastern Hemisphere is not really a big fan of mayonnaise, but we'll get there. So as a brand and as a category leader, it's common to fall into traps, which is to play comfortably, not being bold enough in communication, just being basic. And we felt that we were not being bold enough in our comms recently.
So we decided to invite our friends at Edelman and challenge them with a nice brief. And I'll I think Jamie will talk a bit more about it, right? Yeah, and I think just to build on what Giles said there, we all know what we're competing against right now, right?
Like, it's not like we're just competing against other competitors in the sector. We're competing against other content on Instagram or TikTok. Like, we've got to do stuff that breaks through.
And, like, playing it safe is no longer good enough to break through. So, to this point of Giles, we needed to sort of be a little bit more bold. We needed to break through. We needed to do something different. And this is what we're doing.
where the sort of journey started about 18 months ago, right? Exactly. Well, you know what, let's not talk more.
Let's show the video and then we talk a bit more, right? Oh, well, just before we show the video, I think one thing I want to just check is that does anyone here... So we're gonna keep asking you to raise your hand.
By the end of it you're gonna have like really decent shoulder muscle on one side, but like ultimately who here likes fries and mayonnaise? Okay. That's surprising. Not many Americans.
And I think that's one thing that we sort of stand for. for is like obviously with Hellmann's we stand for like the joy of mayonnaise and I think one of the greatest joys in life is fresh hot fries being dipped into mayonnaise and there's like the number one condiment in the UK we noticed that there was a little bit of an insight and something that we observed which is that the UK's biggest fry seller did not offer mayonnaise as a condiment you can get sweet and sour sauce you can get barbecue you can even get strawberry jam if that is what you'd like to dip your fries into I'm not going to judge if that's you, but like, yes, you can get that. And so we saw this as something that we wanted to stand up for. And by standing up for, we sort of stood up for all Mayonnaise fans in doing so.
And we saw great results for it. So with that, I'll play the film. This is no barn, no lettuce, no chicken patty. Is that right?
I don't know if anyone's noticed that, you cannot get mayonnaise at a UK McDonald's Do you just want to pay for mayonnaise? Yeah! Sweet and Frenchies Hot and Frenchies We don't get tired of the song you hear Tonight's a good day We're having a good day We'll call it the Mayo McHack.
The Mayo McHack. Hashtag Mayo McHack. You gotta get a chicken mayo, but you gotta customize it to get rid of the lettuce, the patty, and the bun.
So you're just left with the mayo. Tonight's a good day Is there anyone working for McDonald's that is here, by the way? Okay, thanks, Scott.
No? All right. I think the great thing about this campaign is that it was a huge success. And I think ultimately, whether people did it or not, I think, as you can see, fans bloody loved it, right?
We were standing up on the side of people that absolutely loved mayonnaise with fries. And whether they actually went out there, did the hack and redeemed it didn't really matter. The fact is they loved it. They enjoyed it.
And it was a huge success. As you can see from the results, we had brand uplift. People enjoyed it. More importantly, I don't know whether anyone's been to McDonald's now, but they do offer mayonnaise on the menu as well. Not saying that we had a part of it, but it does seem a little bit coincidental that now they do it.
So that is something fun. And of course, with the great results, this was all big learning for us. And it opened our eyes.
And I think it taught us two big lessons. So first is to let's just not take that seriously as mayonnaise in the end. It's not caviar or whatever.
And it's hard for me to say because this is my life. I spend eight hours a day thinking about mayonnaise. But consumers don't think about that.
that often, I hope not, at least. And this was a big learning for us, so let's not take ourselves seriously. And the second thing is let's champion our fans. It's funny how mayonnaise or condiments, in a way, they can be so polarizing, and there are people that really love ketchup, and they will go and defend and comment on social media, and they are the ones that love mayonnaise. So that was a big idea of let's just keep building over that.
So that campaign actually... happened last year and then this year we thought okay we need to keep doing more so we decided to go for a different kind of a problem it's also a big problem that it's the poor people that are named Heinz but love mayonnaise in Germany right yeah and there are surprisingly there are 35,000 people in Germany named Heinz you count them all how do you get it we didn't use chat GDP we did it the old-fashioned way through the phone book you charge all the hours to the client One by one, yeah. We build for that. And I think the one thing that we were looking at and we were thinking about is, right, should your name necessarily dictate your preferences?
So if someone is named Fisher, do they love sushi? Does someone named Cheeseman potentially love cheese? They could be lactose intolerant. Who knows, right? Someone named Brewer might not love beer.
So we sort of got thinking that actually your name might not necessarily dictate your condiment preference and actually... potentially you might be named Heinz and absolutely bloody love mayonnaise. And we thought this was actually quite an interesting observation and one allowing us to sort of potentially challenge the status quo because we are not a market leader in certain markets, generally are globally, and this is a chance for us to sort of take on a bastion for people in Germany because Germany, surprisingly, is a ketchup-loving country.
Exactly. Yeah, so you're going to watch in a second... the video case as well.
But this started really small with like an Instagram post. And it grew up and it grew as a campaign involved a guy named Christoph that was crazy enough to join us in this one. But he wasn't the only one. In total, eight people decided to go and change their names, even though it's quite hard to change the name illegally in Germany. So I hope you don't need to go through that.
But I think I'll stop now. Let's show the video and then we talk more about it. Yeah. Hey, come in!
Hi, I'm Christoph Heinz. And I prefer Mario. I'm going to change my name to Helmanns.
Nothing more Heinz. So much paper money. And now Heinz becomes Helmanns.
My name is Jennifer Heinz. From Susie Heinz to Susie Hellmanns. From Heinz to Hellmanns. There I am!
So, you know what? I'm gonna join them. I'm Nicholas Hellmanns.
100%. I'm gonna become Katie Hellmanns. The Italian just became a Hellmann's Beautiful So you can see that it's such a big real problem right now.
It's of course a silly thing, it's provocative, it's a real big drama. It's not a big drama, but you might think, okay, who would be crazy enough to go and change their name just to talk about it? their love for mail but actually you'll be curious to wait and see would someone do that and that's the whole playfulness of this campaign and as Jamie was saying I think why did this really resonate and it was a success because Germany is actually a ketchup-loving country. So mayonnaise is not the first, the preferred condiment there.
And it's also a country where Hellmann's, as a brand, it's not the lead in mayonnaise. We only actually entered the market a few years ago. So we are a real challenger in Germany. So the combination of these factors, plus the fact that there are 35,000 people named Heinz, was a great ingredient for a big recipe for us to do this.
And I think... I think, yeah, like the other thing about this that was quite nice is that obviously I think pretty much everyone in this room is aware of like the restrictions on what we can and can't say, right? We can't ever turn around as a competitor brand, turn around and say that people prefer us more or that, you know, that you should, you know, choose sort of Hellman's over Heinz.
But if a member of the public says it, that's totally fine. So by getting these people to switch their name, it totally opened up the doors for us to sort of talk about the people. in Germany that did love mayonnaise over ketchup. And also, I think the other thing is these sort of few people that standing up and making such a big switch enabled all sort of mayonnaise lovers to sort of go like, hang on, like, I love Hellmann's mayonnaise as well.
And like, we saw that in the social commentary. We saw that with the way that they engage with us. Like, they had a lot of fun with us, which was quite good. And we saw that, like, you know, there was a lot more engagement than we ever sort of expected. We thought maybe one or two people hopefully would raise their hand because they had sort of like eight.
people as well as people around the world doing it, which is really exciting. And obviously the guy who happens to be in Germany that was part of Heinz's award-winning campaign the year before, he then jumped on board and wanted to be part of it. So that was kind of a real fun thing for us too. Indeed. And the whole call to action for this campaign started in a very simple way.
It was like, okay, Instagram post. Do you know anyone named Heinz that actually love Mayo? If so, or if you love him, love, Mayo just, why don't you change your name to Helmhans and declare your love for Mayo.
And that's a bit silly, absurd, of course. And we, like Jamie was saying, okay, we're hopeful that maybe one or two will do it. And in the end, we saw eight. And these started to grow. And it was, okay, people are interested in seeing more about it.
Right, Jamie? Yeah, for sure. And then, like, I think that's where we decided, like, maybe we can have a little bit more fun with this.
And we don't have to sort of stop here at the name switching. So we started engaging with them. We started responding to them. We were doing the stuff that I think we always wanted to do, but we hadn't done in that market yet. So when people were turning around and saying they wanted to be part of the Hellman's family, we were creating family album photos, those awkward pictures that I think we were all dragged to do when we were kids.
We brought out a Spotify Hellman's playlist, which just happened to be Jao's favorite playlist. Highly recommended. Yeah, yeah, exactly.
It was just his playlist. We did engage. If there was anything that people said, we brought it out there. We put it in-store, posted. so that when we were sort of, people were going to store to buy ketchup or Hellmann's, we were putting up advertising sort of showing that people actually preferred, like, you know, Hellmann's mayonnaise.
We even brought out, they're not on this picture, but they were in the film, limited edition bottles for people with their name on it. So instead of it just being like Hellmann's, it was like Christoph Hellmann's. So there was loads of things that we actually did. And the great thing is that it was just fun and it was fast.
Like even the main film that you saw that was in the case film, we turned that around in a weekend. right we like He flew up, found the guy, got it filmed, put it out pretty bloody quickly as well. And we had a good surprise, the guy that was the son-in-law, right?
Oh yes, and one more person that posted, we actually had a descendant of Richard Hellman's, the guy who was the son-in-law. that started the company comment on this and was like, can I be part of it? I'm part of the family.
Well, it is your family business, so like sure. Fair enough. Exactly. And I think what we can see, and I'm just going to go back a slide, is that like leaning into this fandom was like really great for us. Not only did we see a 200% increase in purchase consideration, we got brand views and brand loves, but the one thing that we actually saw was that 59% of people would now consider buying mayonnaise over ketchup in this market, which was a huge uplift for us.
Indeed. And I think to kind of start wrapping it up, I think two big learnings for us. So one is that even being a leader, a brand that is leading the market, you can act as a child. challenger, even when you're not really a challenger brand, like what we did with the Mayo Mac hack in the UK, where we are market leaders, but also then really acting like a real challenger as we are in Germany.
So it's this kind of a playful spirit, provocative, but always with, and then that's the second point, it's critical, is the tone of voice, the personality. Helmus has always been slightly silly, right? Funny in a way, lighthearted.
And if you do that way, it doesn't become... like oh you're starting a war or something. No, it's playful, right? We can do a bit of a banter, like I hope you've seen us doing a bit. It's that kind of a mentality that we are driving for the brand.
Yeah and I think on that, like the great thing is we have like a huge loyal fan base, right? We have people, they're kind of telling us what they want, right? We go on the social media, McDonald's, the McHat work, we saw that because it was showing up in Reddit forums, it was up on social media feeds, like even the the Mail and the Sun wrote about it because they noticed people talking about it.
So us engaging and seeing what mattered to them and acting on what mattered to them and challenging the status quo on things that they loved or were passionate about was where we saw the real results. And I think that was the true key to the success in everything that we've done so far. I do want to say thank you very much for your time.
And I think hopefully by the end of this, we hope that now you will prefer mayonnaise over ketchup. So thank you. Yeah, thanks.