The United Nations views pulses, such as dried peas, beans and lentils, as a key to solving global food security and poverty and, as such, declared 2016 the International Year of Pulses.
The Dubai-based Global Pulse Confederation is a not-for-profit organisation comprising 18 national federations and more than 600 private sector companies. It appointed agency Dissident to engage consumers with pulses, with an ambition to grow global consumption by ten per cent by 2020.
Dissident decided to focus its activities on ‘new’ pulse consumers and challenge their perceptions of the food. It targeted people interested in healthy eating, food sustainability and new ideas who were comfortable with digital channels.
The campaign focused on three core messages and themes, that emerged from a global research report We are what we eat produced by Nielsen: food (quality, taste and versatility), health and wellbeing and sustainability. These were turned into message maps, with mini campaign hashtags, under the overarching brand LovePulses and its associated hashtag. A series of Facebook and Twitter advertising campaigns were launched to drive volume and visibility.
An analysis of those engaging with these campaigns allowed Dissident to refine its target audience on Facebook to college-educated women aged 25 to 44, who were in a relationship or married and were interested in healthy eating, cooking and new foods. Global Pulse Confederation’s social media platforms and website, pulses.org, were the primary channels for the LovePulses campaign.
Over 15 months, Dissident developed a programme of content and community management, encouraging user-generated content from people interested in sharing their thoughts and ideas. It also focused on a calendar of occasions and national days to highlight the campaign. For example, a #PulseFeast Thunderclap call to action to eat pulses, which was backed by the United Nations, achieved 20.8 million impressions in 24 hours and trended worldwide for six hours.
To coincide with Earth Hour, the World Wildlife Fund wrote a blog encouraging people to eat pulses, which reached more than 191,000 people. By building relationships with influencers, such as bloggers, nutritionists and celebrity chefs, the LovePulses campaign also generated more than 1,700 pieces of coverage globally.
The campaign led to a 47 per cent increase in the number of Google searches for ‘pulses’ and achieved in excess of 433 million hashtag impressions and 3.67 million engagements. More than 236,000 people also visited www.pulses.org.
Farmers in America reported sales of lentils rose 11.1 per cent while chickpeas increased 6.4 per cent over the year, while India now expects pulse production to exceed 20 million tonnes by 2017, a level not seen in 60 years.
‘This was a truly good, multi-channel approach for a campaign rooted in real insights,’ said the judges.
