Marketing snapshot - Hortlink 2017, edition 4

This Hort Innovation Lychee Fund marketing snapshot has been taken from Hort Innovation’s Hortlink 2017 edition 4.

Hort Innovation is responsible for investing the lychee marketing levy into a range of activities to grow awareness and consumption, under the Hort Innovation Lychee Fund. Here’s a look at some of the recent and upcoming activity helping Aussies celebrate summer with Australian Lychees.

Year one of a three-year vision

The campaign kicked off the season building on the celebration of lychees and the ‘loving lychee’ campaign of previous years, with an overarching strategy that focuses on the emotional connection consumers have with lychees and consumption occasions, rather than recipes.

The lychee campaign is focussed on getting the best return on investment and as such there are three key areas that the budget is focusing on: planning, media outreach and social media.

Planning

This area of the campaign involves identifying the key messages for the program, developing the look and feel of the social media content, and ensuring that the barriers consumers have to purchasing lychees are overcome through awareness, education and inspiration.

Media outreach

This aspect of the lychee marketing campaign involves the preparation of media releases that highlight key messages and opportunities to celebrate lychee love – for example, ‘Tis the season to love lychees’ to leverage the festive season and its celebratory occasions perfect for consuming lychees.

More detailed aspects of this activity involve preparing Christmas hampers to share with key social media influencers who have a large consumer fan base. Supply of the hampers and other campaign material is set to support these influencers in sharing inspiring shots of lychees as a ‘go to’ for summer entertaining with their audiences, celebrating the deliciousness of lychees and promoting consumption.

The hampers will be delivered across the season to ensure coverage appears throughout the production season.

As we are all increasingly ‘plugged in’ to a device, whether it’s a smartphone or laptop – scrolling through around 90m of content per day – it’s increasingly more challenging to capture consumer attention. Video and moving images do this, and as such there will be specific lychee video content created that highlights the lychee story and cuts through to consumers.

Social media

The industry’s social media campaign involves harnessing the lychee love from dedicated fans and leveraging Facebook and Instagram, with two posts per channel per week. The content of these posts speaks to three core celebration themes:

• Summertime
• Me time
• Party time

Around these themes content will be created that gives consumers usage ideas – always fresh with a focus on entertaining; lychees as art with abundant ‘Buddha bowls’ (beautiful fresh food bowls); and fun facts about lychees. All growers are encouraged to send through the pictures and videos that talk to these themes that can be shared in industry channels.

Coming up

Keep an eye out for the lychee feature in the January edition of Nourish magazine. There will also be a small consumer research project undertaken to confirm the drivers and barriers consumers face in the decision to buy lychees, the results of which will be communicated through Hort Innovation and industry communication channels like Living Lychees when available.