“Wild Hive has been a longtime partner of the lamb industry, and they continue to bring innovative ideas and opportunities to support our work. Their ability to marry nutrition messaging with culinary know-how has exceeded our expectations and delivered fantastic results. The Wild Hive teams’ relationships with nutrition professionals, combined with their professional experience in retail and foodservice, have made them exceptional partners. They are efficient and results-oriented partners who deliver excellence with every program.”Megan WortmanExecutive Director American Lamb Board
Repositioning & Rebranding Lamb to Educate and Inspire Nutrition Professionals
Results
More than
63 million
impressions through nutrition ambassador program, earning media placements from nutrition professionals
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Lamb & Mediterranean Diet hands-on Culinary Medicine educational workshops were rated as “excellent” by 93% of attendees
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Opportunity to integrate lamb and lamb producer into non-sponsored educational content at Health Meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference
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Over 70 nutrition professionals attended nutrition influencer dinners and Lamb & Culinary Medicine hands-on workshops over two-year time frame
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Food and Nutrition Magazine’s Test Kitchen partnership resulted in more than 100 social media posts from 47 unique authors for a total social media audience of 346.4K followers and 751.8K impressions; e-blast open rate of 42.9% with 659 click-throughs
Problem
For more than six years, the Tri-Lamb Group successfully targeted nutrition professionals through its “Lean on Lamb” campaign, which focused specifically on positioning lamb as a lean meat. This was an effective positioning during the time period when nutrition professionals were focused almost explicitly on nutrient content/messaging and were less inclined to embrace fat, especially the types of fat found in red meat. Over time, however, attitudes shifted. Nutrition professionals were becoming more interested in trending foods with a focus on flavor, nutrient density, and agricultural practices, and they were less fixated on the fat content of meat.
Wild Hive was challenged to reposition and rebrand lamb for the nutrition professional audience to align with current trends and mindsets toward food.
Solution
Wild Hive identified an opportunity to reposition lamb from a focus on the absence of negatives (fat content) to the presence of positives (nutrient density, rich flavor, family farming, pastoral image). Wild Hive used this new positioning as the basis to rebrand from “Lean on Lamb” to “Nourish with Lamb” and created a campaign that aligned lamb with the trending interests in pasture-raised meat and the Mediterranean Diet.
Specific components of this work included:
- Updating the nutrition messaging to reflect new USDA-approved nutrient data for lamb
- Development of key messaging to align with new positioning
- Creative content development including recipes, photography, educational materials (toolkits, fact sheets, booklets), and a new website
- Nutrition professional influencer dinners in key markets
- Partnership with internationally-recognized Culinary Medicine program to host Lamb & The Mediterranean Diet hands-on educational workshops
- Sponsorship of Health Meets Food: The Culinary Medicine Conference to reach broad audience of nutrition professionals, including physicians, nurses and registered dietitians
- Partnership with Oldways Preservation and Trust (due to Oldways’ focus on Mediterranean Diet) on toolkit for nutrition professionals
- Nutrition Ambassador Program to influence nutrition professional peers, extend reach to the consumer audience, and generate additional creative content for the Tri-Lamb Group
- Food and Nutrition Magazine Test Kitchen partnership
- Ongoing issues monitoring and strategic council regarding dietary and environmental concerns related to red meat
- Working closely with client to facilitate USDA review and promptly respond to USDA requests