The HoC's March Chronicles: The Best Brands Awards! #1

Serviceplan and GfK share the same passion: Building Best Brands. On the 21st of March 2024, at the Best Brands Awards, we unveiled the 20 winners of the 2024 edition, determined by a survey of 4,500 Belgian consumers. In our next House of Communication Chronicles, discover what the winners had to say about their amazing performance! In this edition, delve into exclusive interviews with Valerie Delaby, Senior Marketing Manager Europe at PepsiCo, and Peter Zijlstra, Marketing Director Benelux for Mercedes-Benz. Also, read about our Best Brands sponsor Channel Factory, and how they empower concious and sustainable business performance in 2024.

#1 Lay’s is Best Salty Snacks & Best Product Brand 2024!

Delve into an exclusive interview with Valérie Delaby, Senior Marketing Manager Lay’s Europe at PepsiCo. Enjoy the insights!

What are the main challenges you have faced in terms of marketing and communication to remain/become one of the favorite brands among Belgians this year?

One the the biggest challenge for any brand and therefore for Lay’s is making sure you keep building on distinction and stand out of the crowd in the food category. Consumers often have different choices provided by different brands and they tend to switch between them. This is why we need to build a strong emotionnal connection with our consumers to ensure we are top of mind, so when they are at the point of purchase they have no doubts about the brand they will choose.  We are playing in a fun and very dynamic category which give us a lot of opportunities to differentiate and bring new news to excite and please our consumers.  

How important do you consider personalization of your marketing message to better cater to the emotional expectations of your Belgian consumers?

Total connection planning and touchpoint maximization is at the heart of our communication strategy for Lay’s. When developing a campaign, we always start with a deep understanding of our audience. We do not use all the possible touchpoints, we use the relevant ones to ensure campaign effectiveness. Together with our media agency, we do an audience profiling exercise and on top of our broad audience, we define opportunity segments/audiences for which we develop personalization at scale, creating extra relevant personalized content and using relevant touchpoints, from media to shelves, informed by their media consumption profile. Moreover, we work a lot with retailer media tools as it is key to be present at the point of purchase. Proof of success, in 2022, we did not only win a Silver Effie in Belgium, we also got rewarded by a “special mention in touchpoint strategy”.

Can you share examples of strategic partnerships or collaborations that have had a positive impact on your brand's perception in Belgium?

As market leader in the salty snacks category and with flavour being the first category driver, it is essential for us to focus on elevating flavour credentials, delivering unique flavour experience and drive category dynamism. Reason why we innovate every year with new product launches.

In 2021, we launched Lay’s Iconic Restaurant Flavours in Belgium : we turned a bag of Lay’s crisps into a restaurant food experience – by bringing the most-loved crisps and iconic global restaurant signature dishes together to ensure everyone can enjoy their favourite flavours anytime, everywhere (especially in times of covid)! The success of this launch exceeded our expectations and ambitious objectives: becoming the most successful 2021 food innovation and the most successful Lay's campaign of at least the last decade in Belgium!

In 2022, we launched Lay’s Iconic Local Flavours in partnership with Brussels Ketjep, 2 delicious Belgian flavours “Fries Mayo” and “Fries Andalouse”, supported by the #morebelgianisimpossible campaign. We challenged Belgians to find something more Belgian than our flavours and in case of success, we would completely redesign our packs. A few months later, we re-launched our flavours under the “comic strip” limited edition, one in French and the other in Dutch and you needed the 2 to read the full story, #belgischerkanechtniet #yavraimentpasplusbelge.

How do you manage environmental and social sustainability within your industry, and how does this influence the preference of Belgians for your brand?

At PepsiCo our vision is to Be the Global Leader in Beverages and Convenient Foods. Our ambition is to achieve this by Winning with pep+ (PepsiCo Positive). pep+ is our roadmap for how we operate within planetary boundaries and promote positive change for the planet and people. When we launched pep+ in 2021, we recognized that as one of the world’s largest food and beverage companies, PepsiCo has the scale and opportunity to have a significant, sustainable impact on the way food is grown, made and consumed.  We’re delivering on our pep+ ambitions across three pillars and each one of us can play an important role: Positive Agriculture, Positive Value Chain and Positive Choices.

One of the various marketing actions we undertake to support our societal ambition has been our 2023 Lay’s sustainability campaign “Behind every great chip is a great potato”. We wanted to make consumers aware that the potatoes that are used to make their favorite crisps are “100% quality potatoes, sustainably grown”. A large part of these potatoes are grown in Belgium. The campaign aims to show consumers how the quality of the not-so-secret ingredient – the potato – is guaranteed. Lay's are not 'just' chips. They are so much more. Everything starts with growing the potatoes, where regenerative agriculture through the PepsiCo Sustainable Farming Program plays an important role. For example, PepsiCo supports growers through crop rotation and green manuring, among other things; the land is never fallow and the soil remains as healthy as possible. To guarantee the final quality, more than 18,000 quality checks are carried out every year before the potatoes reach the factory. And quality checks are also continuously carried out in the factory. This campaign resulted into positive impact on our Lay’s market share and brand perception metrics.

 Want to know more about how to become or remain a Best Brand? Then get in touch with the Best Brands team at [email protected]

#2 Channel Factory: Empowering Conscious Business Performance in 2024

Consumers expect more and more from brands and companies. Delivering a good product is not enough. They must be socially aware and responsible. They must be a conscious business.

But how can you be a conscious business, whilst still performing well against competitors? This is a question we hear often at Channel Factory.

As a conscious business in the advertising industry, we can ensure both business performance and social responsibility thrive for ourselves and clients in a number of ways:

Inclusion lists

Inclusion lists let you cherry pick the creators and content you are advertised against. At Channel Factory, we encourage our clients to select a diverse range of creators. One Channel Factory client saw a 22% increase in View Through Rate (VTR) using the combination of inclusion lists and contextual targeting. Evidently, inclusion lists not only diversify your audiences but can also increase engagement.

Brand suitability

Brand safety is safe for some, but not safe for all. It is inherently discriminatory to diverse creators and audiences. Brand suitability on the other hand is far more open and inclusive as it is not reliant on over-restrictive block lists. Significantly, brand suitability also ensures that all advertising is placed alongside content that is relevant AND safe. This leads to an average of 28% less misaligned impressions compared to brand safety.

Contextual targeting

Contextual targeting ensures the content you are placed alongside is relevant to your advert, and to your audience, therefore delivering the best results. Moreover, contextual targeting is inherently cookieless and prioritizes consumer privacy. Contextual alignment for our clients ensures they can be conscious, whilst delivering superior performance compared to cookie-based products. In fact, we conducted a survey on this and the result was a 17% lift in ROI (sales) across all verticals using contextual targeting on YouTube.

Reach out at www.channelfactory.com

#3 Mercedes-Benz is Best Automotive Brand 2024!

 Mercedes-Benz wins the "Best Automotive Brand 2024" award thanks to numerous online and offline initiatives. Peter Zijlstra, Marketing Director Mercedes-Benz Cars BeNelux, explains.

"In all phases of the Customer Journey, we are present with above and below the line actions and so-called always-on activities. Equally important is the uniform look and feel; a luxurious Mercedes-Benz appearance. We like to bring this to life at events like the Zoute Grand Prix, where we not only focus on heritage as the inventor of the automobile. We primarily bridge the gap between the present and the future. We do this with imaginative cars and concept cars, as well as with surprising partnerships. For example, the art piece MONDO G - the result of a collaboration between Mercedes-Benz and Moncler - the similarly wrapped coastal tram, and the outdoor advertising all reinforce the luxurious aspirations of Mercedes-Benz."

Want to know more about how to become or remain a Best Brand? Then get in touch with the Best Brands team at [email protected]