CHALLENGE
In 2016, KRAVE came to BSSP seeking a strategic and creative partner to add fuel to their double digit growth targets and help make it become the leading player in the fast growing premium meat snacks category. Acquired by Hershey just a year prior, KRAVE was the organization’s biggest investment in their burgeoning snack portfolio, and an all-natural and sustainably sourced challenger to the over-processed meat snack giants, Oberto, Slim Jim and Jack Links.

Having made a name for itself among the niche active foodie set, KRAVE needed to scale its craft story and culinary-inspired message in its first national brand campaign to engage people who seek out high quality snacks, but have traditionally avoided the jerky aisle.

INSIGHT
To do it, we first had to deeply immerse ourselves (via 90 one-on-one interviews) in the world of the Healthy Foodie to understand their views and attitudes towards the jerky category and how KRAVE, a relative newcomer, could disrupt the snack food status quo.
To the Healthy Foodie, eating well and living well were one in the same, where they wouldn’t compromise between food that is delicious and food that is nutritious. They strive for better, both in how they live and how they eat.

This underlying insight became the foundation for a new brand promise, “KRAVE Higher Ground.”

From there we developed creative platforms based on the “KRAVE Higher Ground” to evaluate against our Healthy Foodie target. Through a series of qualitative and quantitative research, we identified a leading creative platform to restage the brand, To do this, we needed to focus on educating this non-jerky consumer that there was a better jerky and explain why KRAVE was it.

We introduced KRAVE and its fresh take on the meat snacks category through creative platform “KRAVE Better.” Which we executed using online video, TV, print, digital and social.

RESULTS
• The advertising exceeded all of Hershey’s internal performance norms (persuasion, linkage, and key brand attributes.)

• In market, sales increased 7% during the campaign period.