A campaign that cuts the mustard
Premium French mustard brand Maille recruited Kaper to help raise awareness and create saliency for the the brand amongst the target group of ’sociable cultured foodies.’ A staple in France, Maille wasn’t well known in the UK and the team at Unilever were keen to move away from the food PR norms of a celebrity chef and recipe placement.
Our response was a multi-layered campaign spanning PR, experiential, digital and retail marketing. This is what we did…
The Maille Mustard Boutique
We built a pop-up replica of the Maille Boutiques in Paris and Dijon in Spitalfields Market, bringing a world of mustard to London. With over 200,000 visitors in one week, the Maille Boutique gave consumers and media a chance to sample the brand new Maille range including some weird and wonderful flavour combinations. There were many sore arms after cutting 5000 pieces of bread on the final day, but we were delighted to have sold 900 jars – East Londoners clearly like their Dijon!
Popularising the Supper Club movement
A partnership with MsMarmiteLover, Queen of the Supper Clubs, gave us a strong platform to champion the burgeoning Supper Club movement. By night we transformed the boutique into an atmospheric and exclusive Supper Club venue with evenings hosted by MsMarmiteLover and fashion blogger, Liberty London Girl. The Twitterverse and Blogosphere were buzzing with stories about mustard, leading to an 800% increase in social mentions for Maille that week.
Partnership with Waitrose
However, perhaps our biggest innovation on this campaign was our partnership with Waitrose – a first for both Unilever and the supermarket. Knowing the Waitrose audience would prove key to sales success, we created a campaign-long partnership that saw the hub of the campaign become Watirose.com/maille. This link was then used as the call to action throughout the campaign, both for paid-for and earned media.
The partnership with Waitrose focused on the idea of Maille Supper Clubs. The campaign microsite contained recipe ideas and a downloadable Supper Club kit, which was then distributed in-store as part to over 15,000 customers. Coverage was also secured in Waitrose Kitchen and Waitrose Weekend.
Add into the mix a proactive press office which achieved blanket product placement across our target media and you have a recipe for success.
Results
Detailed commercial results are confidential but Maille is performing way ahead of its targets on volume and value.
Check out our video of The Maille Mustard Boutique in action – http://youtu.be/G2-L9rVq4To
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