Cameo
Co-kitchen
Marketing strategies to drive new revenue opportunities in the Millennials age group
About the project
During the second half of the postgraduate course in Digital Entrepreneurship at H-Farm, our major commitment was the development of a project work commissioned by an actual client.
Together with my two teammates we were assigned to work for Cameo, an Italian company specialized in industrial confectionery and bakery.
Objective
The company’s brief we were asked to develop can be summarized as follows:
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"To identify new touchpoints and types of engagement for the consumers of the “cakes” segment, focusing on new possibilities for tailoring both product and service, and with an eye to the audience composed by the Millennials."
A preliminary insight about the company’s history, its mission and core values was provided by Cameo itself. During the initial phase of the project we had the chance to visit Cameo’s HQ and interview our client. We could rely on the support of a contact person from the company (namely, the Marketing Manager) with whom we would make recurring video calls for continuous feedbacks and suggestions.
Meetings with mentors from H-Farm were also occasionally held throughout our research process for consultancy purposes.
Sentiment
Following the suggestion of our mentor, we started our research studying today’s prevailing sentiment towards corporations.
We used the 2017 Trust Barometer published by Edelman as main documentation to draw conclusions about the 6 main sociological trends regarding the consumer-confidence crisis, which recently has been involving any kind of business - and food businesses in particular.
These 6 trends could be summarized in these 3 short concepts:
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Crisis of confidence
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Crisis of the traditional media
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Higher expectations by consumers for quality and commitment
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Starting from the global scenario, we concentrated our analysis upon the main market trends regarding lifestyle and food.
Our work at this stage was mainly being conducted on online researches, from which we defined the 10 most important market trends - which also gave credit to the sociological premises that we had analyzed.
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The spreading of “healthy food”
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The Functional Food
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Increasing number of mobile/video searches
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Brands becoming more “healthifying”
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The Fourth Meal
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The Grocerants
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Food E-Commerce
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Meal-delivery services
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Co-housing
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Behavioural changings driven by the diffusion of voice technologies
We delved into the study of the designated audience, the Millennials – for which we found plenty of online information. Drawing on a wide body of articles and white papers, we could outline a precise identikit of this generation and its trends with a particular emphasis on their relationship with brands and their food habits.
One white paper in particular (an in-depth research concerning the nutritional habits of Millennials) proved to be the most important source of information, allowing us to create a series of personas we would have used later during the idea-generation phase.
Some of the Millennial’s nutritional habits include:
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Time flexibility
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Practicality first and foremost
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Always need to be connected
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Passion for the “home-made” and genuineness
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Eating out
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Guided home-cooking
Ideation
Cameo, which promotes moments of sharing and sustainability among its values, would make available for its customers a fully-equipped space for baking and enjoying cakes.
This space, namely, would be a “shared kitchen”, which Cameo customers could access on prior reservation, getting the chance to freely dispose of it. The most critical area for this project consisted of the high structural costs.
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Issues it contributes to solve are:
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The need for a space where one could share some time together with friends and relatives
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The need to have all the cooking appliances and tools at one’s disposal
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The possibility to easily find the necessary ingredients in order to bake a cake
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The need to easily manage dirt and disorder during the baking process
The Co-Kitchen is divided in 3 areas.
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1) Shopping area: corresponding to the entrance, it’s where the user can shop the ingredients and Cameo products. Access to this area is free
2) Baking area
3) Enjoying area
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Accessing the latter two areas is subject to payment, and is possible by purchasing a package including a ‘baking experience’ (e.g. purchasing the package “Muffins&Cupcakes Experience x 6 people”); otherwise by booking the venue for an event. Each purchase is associated to a specified time limitation inside the Co-Kitchen.
Target personas
Casual baker
A Millennial girl who would like to try a different experience with his group of friends
Baker addicted
Cookery enthusiast who would like to try baking a cake in a different environment than his/her kitchen
Brand positioning
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Co-Kitchen would have a role in communicating the genuineness of the products through the narration of the single ingredients
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Fresh products would originate from local certified producers
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It would feature what we called a digital isle: by placing a product’s packaging over a screen-table, this would recognize it and subsequently display information about the genuine ingredients the product is made from.
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The venue could be used in order to create marketing campaigns or organize theme events involving influencers.
Sustainability model
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Partnerships with design companies for the structure and the furnishings
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Direct sales of Cameo’s line of products
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Partnerships with companies producing appliances and tools for cooking
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Organization of paid events: cooking classes, premium events, events featuring influencers and other events such as birthday parties, graduations etc.
Fit-Tip
Fit-Tip is a converter device which scans the text of a recipe and identifies the ingredients that may be substituted with healthier options.
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The converter would work thanks to a OCR (optical character recognition) technology, which would allow to identify preset words within recipe books (both offline and online).