Marketing snapshot - 2019/20

Hort Innovation is responsible for investing the passionfruit marketing levy into a range of activities to drive awareness and consumption, under the Hort Innovation Passionfruit Fund. Here’s a quick look at some of the activities and achievements of 2019/20, for both the domestic and export marketing campaigns.

This year saw another successful Australian Passionfruit marketing campaign to help drive growth for the category. The focus was on driving consumption by encouraging passionfruit fans to purchase more frequently as well as enticing more people to start purchasing the fruit.

Public relations

A range of public relations activities undertaken this season delivered a total of 84.5 million opportunities for people to see passionfruit-related content through a mixture of traditional and online coverage.

MEDIA OUTREACH

The objective of the media outreach was to position Australian Passionfruit as a delicious addition to any meal. This was achieved through a mix of press releases, seasonal updates inclusive of facts and health information, passionfruit hampers, and influencer engagement with recipe and photography content creation.

 These activities were designed to educate, inspire, and remind consumers at the appropriate time about passionfruit availability consumption – equipping consumers with the information needed to go and purchase passionfruit.

Throughout the campaign, the Australian Passionfruit brand appeared in 105 items of media coverage and with the heavy glut experienced in the recent winter peak, additional coverage in the form of TV and radio was secured to further encourage consumers to buy passionfruit.

MEDIA FARM TOUR

In February 2020, Australian Passionfruit hosted a media session with publishing house Bauer Media to showcase passionfruit to key magazine titles in a fun and engaging afternoon. The session was led by passionfruit grower Jane Richter from the Sunshine Coast, who taught the journalists all about passionfruit and how they are grown. Jane also demonstrated how to make a passionfruit gin spritz recipe which was a centrepiece of campaign content. The passionfruit masterclass was attended by journalists from outlets including Woman’s Day, OK! Take 5 and NW.

AMBASSADOR

Over the last three years, Australian Passionfruit has been working with influencer and blogger Nagi from Recipe Tin Eats, who is rated as Australia’s No.1 food blogger nationally. In 2019/20, the partnership focussed on inventive yet simple recipes involving passionfruit. Nagi attended the farm visit in 2019, and in turn created three recipes that hero passionfruit. The recipes, videos, and images of the recipes were used for distributing to media and re-posting on the Aussie Passionfruit social media accounts.

Nagi shared these recipes with her large social media community and helped drive home messaging to add a splash of passion to turn meals from ordinary, to extraordinary. All up, Recipe Tin Eats shared 17 posts showcasing passionfruit recipes, reaching more than 13.9 million in Nagi's audience alone. A further 4.9 million in reach was earned from media sharing the content.

Influencer activity

To extend consumer reach, particularly among lighter and/or younger buyers of Australian Passionfruit, a micro -influencer campaign was implemented. This involved engaging eight micro -influencers (influencers with more than 100,000 followers that specialise in niche topics) during the winter peak to develop beautiful content that provided ideas on how to use passionfruit in different dishes while encouraging fans to follow the Australian Passionfruit Instagram page.

This activity generated 489,000 opportunities for Australians to see passionfruit inspired content and garnered 7,000 likes.

Social media

The ‘always on’ approach to social media is designed to keep passionfruit top of mind throughout the year for consumers, with heightened activity during seasonal peaks. During 2019/20, the Australian Passionfruit Facebook page (www.facebook.com/aussiepassionfruit) and Instagram (@aussiepassionfruit) shared a mix of created and curated content to inspire passionfruit use throughout the whole year.

Baking recipes involving passionfruit performed best across both accounts, especially during 2020 where there was an increase in at-home cooking. Content that included messaging on the health benefits of passionfruit were the most engaged with across both platforms, and the post with the highest engagement was of a healthy dessert involving passionfruit.

There was a total of 24 posts across the campaign and this activity reached 2.9 million people with engaging passionfruit content. There was also a focus on growing the Aussie Passionfruit Instagram page following, which experienced a 31 per cent increase in followers over the campaign period.

The campaign results from this season have been impressive. Accounting for the combined reach of earned media, earned social and influencer/ambassador activity, the year’s activity generated more than 95 million opportunities for people to see passionfruit content.

In-store sampling

The objective of in-store sampling was to increase the number of households buying passionfruit or what is known as household penetration. This was achieved by demonstrating how easy it is to ‘add a splash of passion’ with a delicious sample and simple recipes to make at home.

In-store activity occurred for five weeks starting in July and extending into August in Coles, Woolworths and independent grocery stores across the country. Fresh passionfruit was sampled, and recipe brochures handed out. Consumers were also educated around seasonality, storage and handling.

A total of 81 sampling sessions were completed, with brand ambassadors achieving over 7,500 interactions with shoppers (an average of 93 per session).