Alpha Foods is a challenger brand in a challenger category. As a start-up and relatively new entrant in the highly competitive and noisy plant-based landscape, Alpha was late to the game and business as usual was not going to cut it.

Dwarfed by juggernauts like Morningstar and Impossible Foods, we were being outspent 25:1 and 10:1 respectively. Investors in our biggest competitors included the Serena Williams, Jay Z, and Katy Perry, A-list celebrities whose influence and reach far outmatched ours.

Alpha had a lot of ground to cover on both awareness and sales. As a plant-based brand with huge aspirations, we knew that focusing on vegans was a losing proposition; we needed to convert plant-curious meat eaters.

The challenge: How do we get these reluctant meat lovers to be open to Alpha’s plant-based alternatives?

In an effort to restore balance in the chicken market, we slashed our own prices in inverse proportion to the skyrocketing price of chicken. Using data from the USDA, we monitored the constantly surging prices and adjusted ours accordingly. We inversely pegged the price of Alpha’s plant-based chicken nuggets to the rising prices of chicken. Every time the price of chicken went up, the price of Alpha chicken nuggets went down by the same amount.

Because we were solving a legitimate economic problem, it was only fitting to get the word out in legitimate economic platforms. We created a digital price tracker for the NASDAQ board in Times Square that updated the price in real time and ran an economic analysis in The Wall Street Journal, both of which directed consumers to Chickenflation.com, where they could cash in on plant-based chicken at its current uninflated price.

Since the start of summer 2021, regional news stories that included anecdotes about chicken shortages and increases in the price of chicken began to surface. We were interested in figuring out whether a bigger problem was afoot. Was this a short-term, Covid supply-demand issue, or was there more to these stories?

To get a holistic view of the trajectory of poultry prices, we turned to the ultimate source: the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The USDA reports aggregate advertised prices of poultry across every single retailer in the US.

Upon monitoring three months of USDA chicken retail reports, we saw a clear inflationary pattern. There was a legitimate chicken crisis happening, and no one was doing anything about it.

To draw attention to how we were fighting Chickenflation, we placed a digital tracker on the NASDAQ board in Times Square that showed the price of Alpha chik’n decreasing each time the price of poultry increased. A mobile takeover on the NYT and retargeting ads drove consumers to Chickenflation.com, where they could cash in on plant-based chik’n at uninflated prices. Street teams outside popular chicken fast-food restaurants encouraged consumers to try Alpha’s plant-based options. We also ran a full-page “economic” analysis in The Wall Street Journal, bringing attention to the underperforming roosters who had crashed the flock market.

Chickenflation received more earned media attention than any other campaign in Alpha Foods’ history, far outmatching our investment. In total, the campaign landed 500MM+ total earned media impressions, The story got picked up by national media outlets, including Mic, Fast Company, and Fox Business, which even invited our CEO to comment on “Chickenflation.”

We saw an immediate impact on consideration, with a 7X increase in website traffic (100% of the increase in traffic came directly from Chickenflation.com) and a 98% increase in social mentions.

The campaign also successfully drove conversion. E-comm chik’n nugget sales were up 31% and 50% of the sales came from new consumers. Total Alpha sales got a boost too, with a 17.7% increase in the week following the activation.

Most importantly, we restored balance in the flock market and made plant-based chicken accessible to all chicken eaters