Brand Strategy, Creative and Advertising, PR and Communications
Our campaign for Philips airfryer turned around the fate of a brand struggling to reassert its market dominance. Through our strategic, creative and integrated comms approach, we transformed brand perceptions and supercharged desire to purchase – reinstating Philips as the original innovator and growing market share by 900% YOY.
Our objective was to become the brand of choice. We needed to make the brand visible, relevant and credible – to drive emotional connection in an otherwise transactional category to impact purchase consideration.
The following commercial goals were set:
Smoking Gun’s strategic division, the Intention Unit, created a measurement framework with business impact and outcomes at its core. This provided absolute clarity and consistency on how success would be measured.
Specific communications goals included:
Our Intention Unit set to work understanding the customer problem that we needed to solve and the intricacies of the journey to purchase.
Our food PR campaign would leverage NPD to reinvigorate Philips as the best airfryer brand – leading with the dual basket airfryer and a first-to-market airfryer with steam.
There would be no above the line activity – PR, social media and influencer marketing campaigns would be the only driver.
Buying an airfryer was hinged around speed and ease – but cooking is all about TASTE. We needed to remind the nation that food is all about flavour. And so we developed ‘ALL IN GOOD TASTE’, our creative platform to build salience – focussing on emotional rather than functional benefits.
The strategy hinged around:
Being visible – through always-on reviews and content to aid customers in their purchase research journey
Being credible – using our expertise to position Philips as the only airfryer that creates the perfect taste every time – the brand you can trust
An emotional connection – exciting, inspiring and disruptive campaign moments to build standout in the category
We needed to build mass awareness, and so maximised earned media, social media and influencers to take our campaign message as far and wide as possible.
Bringing to life ‘All In Good Taste’ via our strategy…
Being visible
A relentless press office effort ensured our products were included in every. single. round-up of best air-fryers – from tabloid to broadsheet, online to TV.
We gifted influential writers and product was held up as best in the market by titles like Metro and Good Housekeeping, with retailer weblinks.
Working with food passionate micro influencers enabled us to create a constant stream of organic and engaging content around family-friendly meals. We created social content for key calendar moments like Valentine’s Day, jumped on viral food trends and created our own.
Being credible
We heroed Philips’ in-house chef, Martin Senders, to demonstrate our taste expertise and to satisfy the media and consumer appetite for airfryer content across channels.
His tips and hacks took media coverage beyond product placement, as he became the authority on everything from giant Yorkshire puddings to airfryer crisps and full Christmas dinners. Such was the success of the content that Martin now has his own contributor page on The Independent.
His content enabled our Instagram reels to ooze with mouth-watering creations and was highly engaged with. We pointed to key retailers to seamlessly drive traffic to product pages. We partnered with beloved brands like Hellmans, Marmite, Pret, and Itsu.
Finally, we secured Good Housekeeping Institute accreditation – the highest stamp of approval in product quality, to build trust.
An emotional connection
Disruptive campaign moments included teaming up with comedy and podcast queens ‘LuAnna’ to launch Philips’ Steam & Fry Airfryer. They hosted a packed media and influencer NPD event and dropped scroll-stopping content. This alone drove 1.6 million views and 700k engagements – as well as featuring on the LuAnna podcast itself which has 1.2 million listeners.
Other playful tactics include our launch of disruptive No Airfry Day. Playing on ‘cult of the airfryer’, this was a tongue-in-cheek 24-hour blackout on airfryer content, including an apology letter and a challenge to competitors, generating mass social engagement and national media coverage.
Our 12-month campaign met and exceeded all commercial and communications goals
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