BAC'ELSTEIN

TitleBAC'ELSTEIN
BrandBAGELSTEIN
Product/ServiceBAGEL
Category A06. Retail
Entrant BAGELSTEIN Strasbourg, FRANCE
Idea Creation FAMOUSGREY PARIS, FRANCE
Credits
Name Company Position
Romain Repellin FamousGrey Executive Creative Director
Régis Boulanger FamousGrey Executive Creative Director
Anthony Legrand FamousGrey Copywriter
Sergio Alves FamousGrey Art Director
Charles Baderspach FamousGrey Account Director
Barbara Georget FamousGrey Account executive
Gilles Abecassis Bagelstein CEO
Marion Champain Bagelstein Head of communication

Why is this work relevant for PR?

The aim of the campaign was to increase brand awareness and brand preference across a specific target, the high school student. We manage to turn the packaging of a side product into an innovative earned-media tactic, a massive conversation topic and a representation of the brand spirit. It succeeded in several ways, online with over 2 million organic views and in-store with an increase of restaurant visits.

Background

Bagelstein is the French leader of Bagels. They have more than 120 restaurants in France and are extending in EU. In order to reinforce the brand preference and build awareness across the 15-20 years old target, Bagelstein decided to communicate around the once-in-a-life time event for high school students in France: the Baccalauréat (french high school diploma). The question was simple: how to approach the target in a clever and unique way to create organic discussion, when you’re a bagel franchise?

Describe the creative idea

To interfere in the everyday life of the high school students, before and during the Baccalauréat (french high school diploma), and to have echo with a wider audience (consumers, social media users), we created the first bottle with cheat sheet on it. We produced a range of 4 bottles of water sold in all the restaurants of the French bagel franchise. On each bottle, we replaced the standard information by specific cheat sheets written by teachers for the exam, on 4 different subjects: Philosophy, English, History - Geography and Economy.

Describe the strategy

We decided to focus our communication on the 15-25 years old, urban target. They represent around 40% of the customers going to Bagelstein to have lunch everyday, as most of the restaurants are located in the city center and usually close to high schools. The media to use was clearly social media with a focus on Facebook and Instagram. We also created a PR kit to send our bottles to media and influencers with close accointance to our target. We thought that productising was really close to Bagelstein spirit, and it also appears to be an innovative way to get the closest we could to our target audience, without being seen as an invasive brand.

Describe the execution

The first thing we did one week before the official launch was to send 100 PR kits with bottles to young radios (NRJ, Ado, Skyrock, Virgin radio...), to blogs, to TV channels, online newspaper and food influencers in order to have the maximum impact when we launched the campaign. We also change the supply chain during one month, to replace the classic bottles’ labels by our special “cheat sheet” labels. Then, we produced a 40 seconds video in mobile format to present the concept on Facebook and Instagram, splits in 10 seconds to be used as story on Instagram. The bottles were available for sale in the French restaurants in June. The campaign was launched the 1st of June, 17 days before high school diploma. There was no media budget associated to the launch of the campaign.

List the results

Tier 1: 50 million impressions (Social media, TV, PR coverage). Multiple TV coverage of the campaign with the biggest one on LCI Channel (national channel). More than 2 million organic views on Facebook and Instagram, making Bac’elstein the most seen video in the history of our Facebook page. Tier 2: Highest engagement rate with more than 90K interactions (likes, comments, shares) More than 5000 new followers during the campaign period. Tier 3: Increase by 20% of the restaurant visits during the period. 140 000 bottles sold