Cannes Lions

Tastes Like Competition

ALMAPBBDO, Sao Paulo / HABIB'S / 2023

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OVERVIEW

Background

Habib's is a local fast-food chain, even with 400 stores all over Brazil. When the audience needs to choose somewhere to buy a quick meal, they usually go for the giant chains like McDonald's or Burger King. So we needed to bring them into our stores to eat something that none of our competitors has: sfihas – which look like a little pizza without tomato sauce, but with delicious toppings. The company also needed to increase sales at the stores and on their app. Habib's motto is "everything tastes better on a sfiha", and we needed to prove that using new products in a fun, delicious way.

Idea

Recent advertising from Habib's tells the audience two facts: everything tastes better on a sfiha and Habib's is for everybody to come and enjoy delicious sfihas. But the people who decided to go to competitors' stores were never going to find that out.

To invite them to visit Habib's and try our main and exclusive product, we proved that literally everything tastes better on our sfihas in a simple way: we made new sfiha flavors that tasted exactly like the competition's main meals, like the Big Mac, the Whopper, Taco Bell's tacos and KFC's fried chicken.

We didn’t just invite hardcore sfiha lovers, we also reached out to the competition's employees –who could eat for free if they showed up dressed in their uniforms - and fans - by telling them that when their favorite stores are closed, ours are open 24/7 for you to taste that flavor you love.

Strategy

Despite being a well-known brand in Brazil, Habib's has always been at a lower level of consideration in comparison to major fast-food brands such as McDonald's and Burger King.

Our objective here was to increase Habib’s penetration by raising the sales of the brand’s main product: the sfiha.

We needed to be desired by fast-food consumers. To be more specific, men and women ages 18 to 60 from the Brazilian middle class.

To boost our brand positioning, “Call everyone,” our strategy was to bet on our main asset, showing people that everyone is welcome to taste our sfihas. Even our competitors.

Execution

A welcoming invitation – for everyone!

For this case, we took things a step further:

As a challenger brand, we created and developed - in partnership with our client - new products that invited everyone (including our competitors) to go to Habib’s. And the best thing was that these new products were Sfihas inspired by our main competitors.

We developed flavors based on their main products:

So, for McDonald’s, we created the Big Mac-flavored Sfiha.

For Burger King, the Whopper-flavored Sfiha.

The KFC-flavored sfiha

And finally, for Taco Bell, the Taco sfiha.

Despite a law that prohibits us from mentioning our competitors by name, we developed a gimmick in our campaign that everyone understood and rushed to Habib’s.

A genius piece of work.

PS: Genius is our brand’s animated mascot.

Outcome

- The company had a 72% increase in sales

- Orders that had any of the campaign products had an average ticket 20% higher than the usual.

- We grew 15% in revenue compared with the same period previous year.

- More than 10 million impressions on free media

- Competition's Employees: more than 1200 sfihas tried in one day

- Most talked-about fast food campaign in 2022

- Sfiha: most searched term online in Brazil

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