In 2017, trends towards healthier snacking amongst city-based young adults saw California Almonds’ shipments to China increase by 12.5% placing them as the #1 supplier for China, the world’s biggest market.

Then Donald Trump decided to start a trade war with China.

China retaliated, with almonds caught in the crossfire. Of all products to be taxed, almonds got one of the worst deals, slapped with a tariff that reached 50% by July 2018 (whereas Australia’s almond exports to China were taxed just 2%!) Supporting an industry with over 105,000 employees, marketing needed to work harder than ever to avoid an absolute crisis.

Business is monitored only in shipments from the US to China, and obviously, this was going to be badly affected by the trade war. Our job was to limit the damage and maintain business as usual wherever possible.

We took a confident stance to promote California Almonds without the distraction of diplomatic tension. In a nutshell, while Trump was trying to make American great again, we were after making almonds great again.

How? By partnering with a designer label to make almonds fashionable.

Armed with the insight that young, health and image-conscious consumers were already very warm to almonds—demand had grown 50% since 2012—we created a breakthrough strategy to keep them engaged and snacking on our nuts.

The beauty market in China is a $37 billion-dollar industry, yet we found that no other brands were capitalizing on this connection between almonds and beauty. Given all the health benefits of almonds—high in “good” fats that keep you going all day, as well as the beauty benefits—packed with Vitamin E to make skin more radiant, we sought a platform where an obvious link could be made.

We found this platform in fashion – where beauty and health are synonymous – and specifically with the lifestyle relevance fashion has amongst our female-leaning, city-focused young working target audience.

Identifying Shanghai Fashion Week as the perfect opportunity, we established a cooperation with a clothing designer as the key ingredient to a strategy to link almonds, health, beauty and fashion.

We partnered with local up-and-coming designer C.J. Yao, using Shanghai Fashion Week Summer/Spring 2019 as the springboard to bring our campaign to life. A content-focused campaign, we leveraged influencers to amplify our messages, an absolute must given our target audience’s obsession with influencers.

C.J. Yao designed an exclusive almond-inspired line for the runway, the hero piece an almond-shaped “It” bag carried during her show, flaunted by influencers and models alike. Every element of the show was California-inspired to go with the branding across screens in and around the show.

Having hooked our audience, we produced special content on social channels Weibo and WeChat and an interactive webpage to let users experience the collaboration. The content included editorials to enhance the California aspect of the brand, like “How to Wear California Sunshine” plus video content distributed on video platforms and across beauty and fashion sites.

A California Almonds-supported initiative for brands to create online retail ‘Pop Up’ shops followed, making the product easily accessible to consumers.

To boost the hype, we worked with 50 top influencers to share with their following why they choose almonds as the snack to keep them healthy and beautiful.

The Almond Board programme to support online retailers to create eCommerce Pop-up stores helped their sales increase by an astounding 213% YoY.

The campaign reached nearly half of China’s entire population, the total exposure pushing 700 million, 20 million of those exposures from Influencer/KOL involvement, with tens of thousands of comments, and 15 million visits to the official California Almonds Weibo page.

In spite of the trade war, positive consumer sentiment towards almonds grew and demand from suppliers meant that in the three months following the campaign, shipments improved, helping limit the trade war impact greatly.