Nescafé produces its coffee with respect for farmers, their communities and the environment. However, Dutch consumers have become skeptical of big brands talking about how sustainable they are.

Our task was to convince skeptical consumers that Nescafé produces its coffee sustainably.

Our budget was €200.000 to build the AR experience, design and produce all the packages and the national campaign. The media budget was approximately €600.000.

Because Dutch consumers don’t trust companies talking about themselves, Nescafé won’t say anything. Instead, we emptied the labels of Nescafé’s top selling products, and invited farmers to create their own - their photography, their design, and their story. By scanning the QR-code on the label, consumers could swipe through hundreds of labels and stories created by the farmers themselves.

The strategy is based on the insight that sustainable stories by large companies are hardly believed by consumers. Big is suspicious. The brief: how can we reinforce Nescafé’s position as a responsible coffee brand without bragging about Nescafé's beautiful projects. The solution is as simple as the brief: we give the podium to the hundreds of coffee farmers to share their stories. The campaign execution itself was less simple and never been done before: by using augmented reality, we turn the recognisable Nescafé label into hundreds of individual labels, one for every coffee farmer that works for us. Together with Nestlé we created a campaign strategy and execution across all phases of the customer journey. We wanted to make sure we going to reach the right audience via the right channels and engage with their customers at the right moment. We divided all content in two layers: discover and engage.

In 6 months, we went from pitch to implementation. With a multidisciplinary team of strategists, creative technologists, developers and designers we developed the AR application and campaign from scratch. All content is personally collected directly from Nescafé’s farmers from all over the world and is partly manually, partly automatically transcreated into personalised and unique virtual labels. The concept was rolled out throughout the Netherlands and ran for six weeks in all supermarkets and in (mainly social) media.

The campaign created a large impact on awareness of Nestlé’s Grown Respectfully platform. Both direct with consumers as well as via a fair amount of media coverage. Users engaged with our farmers all over the world through the XR experience with a dwell time of one and a half minute. For the first time learning about Nescafé's sustainability program from a first hand source. In total 5,85 million impressions were realised using a mix of online, print and instore media. During the weeks the special labels where distributed, we saw a sales uplift of 2% compared to a similar period and – more importantly – 28% off all the customers during the campaign were first time users.