How do you turn a commodity into a brand, across Canada, in both English and French?
Founded in 1854 by John Redpath in Montreal, Redpath Sugar is Canada’s oldest food brand.
Redpath Sugar is 100% cane sugar, it is GMO free, vegan friendly, kosher and not filtered using animal bone char, making for an great product, with genuine craft roots.
But few people were buying sugar by brand name, assuming it to be a commodity. We needed to get the message across that all sugars aren’t created equal.
Rather than choosing the obvious mass media route, TV spots and print advertising, we decided on a strategy that created the Redpath Sugar Acts of Sweetness Program for English speaking Canada, with the Redpath Sugar Bec Sucré program designed to engage our French speaking audience.
Our marketing strategy uses social media and digital media to engage communities, building both brand awareness and product loyalty.
The Acts of Sweetness Community Outreach Program
In English speaking Canada our digital media and social media strategy is anchored by the real world presence of the Acts of Sweetness Community Management Team and their vehicle, a beautifully restored 1947 DIVCO sugar delivery truck. Here’s a video of the team and truck.
The Community Management Team attends community events in the GTA and southern Ontario, handing out sugar cookies and documenting the experience on Facebook, YouTube and Pinterest. The Acts of Sweetness truck and team can be requested to attend these events free of charge.
Social Media Curation and Management
We used social media tools to build a passionate community of bakers, curated and managed by our Community Managers. When we recruit new team members we make sure they are foodies who love baking, this makes connecting with the community effortless and genuine. The team manages Redpath Sugar’s Facebook (English/French), Twitter (English/French), flickr, Pinterest and YouTube (English/French) accounts.
Branded content
Branded content is high up in our content creation strategy for Redpath Sugar and incredibly popular with an audience keen to improve their baking skills. Recipe shares, live-streaming baking shows, How-To’s and teaching videos, we produce them all. Here are some examples.
We created The Acts of Sweetness Kitchen baking show, presented by Erin Bolger, the Happy Baker.
for French speaking Canada, we produced a series of videos of Pro Bakers sharing their tips, tricks and recipes.
Giving people a platform on which they can shine
Part of our content strategy is to frequently run contests on the Redpath Facebook page, centred around baking and showing off contestants’ creations.
Using Redpath Sugar’s social media platform to give home bakers access to a large and appreciative audience has proved to be incredibly popular. Skype interviews of the contestants offered even more connection opportunities.
Contests we’ve run have attracted well over a million pageviews and have pushed fan engagement and sharing on social media ever upward. The moral? People like to be celebrated, show off their skills and talents.