INTERVIEW
Sourdough in four key messages Fedima, the Federation of European Manufacturers and Suppliers of Ingredients to the Bakery, Confectionary and Patisserie Industries, has been conducting a campaign to promote and increase sourdough awareness among industry members and consumers. Fedima’s president, Johan Sanders, reveals the concept, execution, and impact of the campaign based on an in-house consumer study.
+
© F ed im a
Mihu: Why are these kinds of activities imis hardly known. In the Netherlands, where I live, portant in today’s environment? Why sourdough is a little-known topic. With this are such messages necessary dialogues in minimal awareness comes a similarly limited the industry? frequency of consumption. However, in Johan Sanders: One of Fedima’s objecother countries including Germany, Italy, tives is to create a European playing field, or Spain, sourdough is almost mainstream. which is especially important now because There is also a lack of understanding and the playing field is changing from a panawareness regarding sourdough, according European perspective to the trend of going to the research we did in nine countries, back to a local kind of thinking – and Brexit where over 5,000 people were surveyed. We ed im er is just one example of this trend. On the one found that 58% of European consumers do not a’s nd a S pre sident, Joh an hand, going local is associated with familiarity fully understand what sourdough is. This is where and can have positive connotations; but, on the other Fedima can step in and try to educate people about hand, there can be side effects. Confusion is one of them, sourdough. regarding countries where a product is allowed while Mihu: What is the timeline of Fedima’s research? elsewhere it might not be, for example, and the subjective Sanders: The research was carried out in 2019, following a arguments surrounding them, which create confusion among workshop held in Milan, where we discussed with our memconsumers. bers what we could learn from this project. At that General Mihu: Sourdough itself is part of a trend of going back – in Assembly, we also concluded that there was an opportunity time. to talk about sourdough. We decided to start the campaign Sanders: Sourdough is going back and going forward. The in October 2020, to ensure it would be visible and ran it for trigger for the market research on which this campaign is about three months. It recently finished, and we plan a soft built was a need to better understand the market ourselves repeat later on. and learn from that. One of our observations from Fedima’s Mihu: What is the intended audience for the campaign? own market research was that, in some countries, sourdough Sanders: The target is anyone who works with sourdough in general. This is why we chose LinkedIn as the platform to run this campaign: to meet the experts, because they each have their professional network in this space, and to meet consumers who are linked to profiles and pages where the campaign is visible. Ideally, we would like to eventually reach consumers but, we should first educate opinion leaders. Mihu: The campaign ran for three months. What did it entail, from concepts to execution? Sanders: Our marketing and communication committee used the research Fedima developed to brief an external agency. Four videos and nine visuals were made, and all the messages were checked by our technical committee to ensure the messages relayed are accurate and unbiased, aside from being attractive. The workshop in Milan helped us gain an embedded understanding of what key concepts resulted from our research, to really bring forward objective messages of the focus areas. We will follow this sequence in the future: external research, objective information, internal discussion, extract key learnings, which will then be taken by the marketing committee to an agency to translate them into messages that are easy to understand and remember. s
F
© Fedim a
06
www.bakingbiscuit.com 01/2021
