Research told us that Philadelphia used to be seen as “one of the girls”: much more approachable, fun, happy, smiling and human. In other words, a friend. Consumers missed this side of Philadelphia. We needed to find a way to navigate back from “grey old man” to “one of the girls”.

We knew that consumers really liked our recipes when shown them, however, because they currently saw the brand as old-fashioned and cold, they wouldn’t seek out our recipes or visit our website.

Facebook is now clearly established as the most emotive media platform; it’s where our consumers connect with friends and family, and up to 14 times per day. It’s an inclusive digital “coffee morning”.

We knew that chatting, socialising and sharing are central to that coffee morning friendship, these were the ingredients we needed to capture to embed Philly and its recipes back into our consumers' lives.

We targeted as many consumers as possible via their Facebook News Feed with a Messenger-enabled advert. The emoji-based ad, when interacted with, immediately opened a Messenger window with a warm and friendly message from our bot, starting a conversation with the consumer.

We asked consumers to use emojis to tell us how they were feeling; creating an emotional, two-way conversation with our brand, and in the most modern possible way. Philly then suggested recipes for their mood: a quick pasta if you’re in a hurry, an indulgent cake if you've had a bad day etc. We even created responses for when consumers wanted to see what happened if they gave us a silly emoji: feeling like an alien, then we gave an out-of-this-world recipe; devils, cats, footballs etc. all got an appropriate recipe response. We threw in “how-to” animations to help consumers make the recipes, plus funny GIFs.

The campaign was an emotional success!

Our communications reached over 7 million consumers; over 500,000 consumers interacted with us, and over 80,000 people completed the recipe journey to fit their mood by chatting with our bot.

Consumers left us comments like: “Thank you lots – I love it!” and “So delicious! Thank you Philly!” And while we weren’t looking for, or asking for “Likes”, we had over 12,000 and are still counting.

Not only did people enjoy chatting with our bot, we also achieved outstanding brand results.

- Our communications really cut-through to our audience: advertising recall among women 25-44 rose from just 6% to 33%!

- Brand favourability among that group rose by 14 percentage points.

- And those who consider Philadelphia a modern brand rose from 32% to 48%, that’s an increase of 50%.

It successfully leverages the power of the medium, Facebook Messenger, to humanise brands and forge a greater emotional connection with consumers, through the creation of the UK’s first ever recipe chatbot – a highly unusual vehicle for a Consumer Packaged Goods brand more used to utilising traditional broadcast media.

Messenger is the fastest-growing part of Facebook, with users spending more time on that part of the platform than any other, even including the News Feed. This allowed us the perfect opportunity to leverage this to start a conversation and bring back the Philadelphia people felt they could have a “coffee and a chat” with; and a chatbot was the perfect vehicle.

By partnering with a 3rd-party software developer to create a Philly Messenger chatbot, we could express a charming, warm and informal personality, plus demonstrate over 250 recipes. We would be able to have a “conversation” with our consumers and match recipes to their mood, using emoji icons: showing that Philadelphia was an emotional brand and not cold and distant.

Simplicity and a frictionless experience were the key to success given our audience’s resistance to the Philadelphia brand and the size of the budget.

In the UK, Philadelphia cream cheese was struggling to connect with its core target audience – consumers described the brand as “an old grey man, in a grey suit, sitting in the corner, smoking his pipe.” The brand had two serious challenges: it was seen as old-fashioned, and emotionally distant. These negative impressions, unfortunately, were not changed by the brand re-launch above-the-line advertising in 2016, and consequently the brand was becoming irrelevant among its core buyers: 25-44-year-old women. The usual broadcast media channel of 30-second TV advertising was not cutting through to change consumer brand perceptions; in fact, it was possible that the traditional nature of the communication was contributing to consumers’ negative reactions. We needed to reset perceptions and reconnect with our core audience.