About the company
Cognis is a worldwide supplier of specialty chemicals and nutritional ingredients, with a particular focus on the areas of wellness and sustainability. The company serves the food, nutrition and healthcare markets, and the cosmetics, detergents and cleaners industries.
Situation
People want to feel good. That’s why they want the food and drinks they consume not only to provide essential nutrition, but also to give them a sense of pleasure and enhance their well-being. The lifestyle, beauty and health markets are increasingly converging to form a single wellness market.
As chemical products are complex and abstract the challenge lies in making them more attractive and to ensure customers’ preference. Customer communications need to make complex issues easily intelligible, and present benefits in a clear, emotionally appealing way.
Objective and target groups
Cognis aims to help leading manufacturers of the food and beverage market to develop products that deliver genuine well-being benefits, so meeting consumer demands and differentiating their brands from the competition. With its Newtrition strategy Cognis also wanted to position its business Nutrition & Health as a driver for innovation in modern nutrition.
The target groups were the leading manufacturers/formulators for food and beverages, as well as dietary supplements.
Strategy
Cognis wanted to offer more than specialty chemicals, namely integrated solutions and marketing concepts. Based on these objectives, Cognis developed the integrated positioning concept “Newtrition – Eat. Feel. Live.” and chose a comprehensive way for communicating it. The strategy can be summarised as “Think B2C, act B2B” – because Cognis serves its manufacturing customers best by understanding the latest market trends, as well as the needs and wishes of end consumers.
Therefore, Cognis’ marketing, sales and research and technology departments used their knowledge to develop a new wellness-based model for aligning products and solutions with market demands. The model comprises four dimensions where Cognis can shape the well-being experience offered by its customers’ products: emotional perception, taste, effect and convenience.
Technical innovations in these four areas translate into six kinds of benefits to the consumer – beauty, inner balance, vitality, fitness, protection and joy/pleasure. The visuals and copy used in the campaign focus on conveying these benefits, i.e. showing what consumers want to experience and feel.
Implementation – integration from inside out
The campaign marked a shift from separate activities towards an effective integrated strategy for all marketing communications. A comprehensive set of tools and media empowers employees to market the concept and its products, ensures consistency of look, feel and messaging, and helps customers develop products to set their brands apart from the competition.
The implementation of the Newtrition strategy involved:
Roll-in phase to create a shared understanding, including guidelines, sales training, presentations and tool kits to explain the concept to executive managers, sales staff etc. and secure their buy-in
Marketing campaign to generate sales, including an advertising campaign, media relations, sales toolbox, videos, internet updates, brochures, fans, posters, product packaging, customer e-newsletter etc.
The campaign was designed for global use, and messages, visuals and creative executions can be adapted to different regions and cultures for maximum effect.
Results
The Newtrition campaign was launched at Vitafoods trade show in Geneva 2009. At all recent trade shows “Newtrition” attracted a large number of journalists, customers and even competitors. The feedback received from the key stakeholders at the trade shows and in the following months has been excellent, acknowledging the forward thinking approach.
Newtrition made a concrete contribution to new customer acquisition. The following figures bear this out:
- A total of around 750 face-to-face customer conversations on the subject of Newtrition at trade shows
- Between May and October 2010, there were 941 page views for the Newtrition web page, with a remarkably long average time on page of 82 seconds.
- 4,500 brochures were distributed to food and beverages and dietary supplements customers.
Also trade media picked up on the campaign and its key messages. In the period immediately following the launch of Newtrition in 2009, almost two thirds of all articles about Cognis Nutrition & Health referred to the issue of wellness.
The success of Newtrition emphasises Cognis’ competence to combine its profound chemical technical know-how with an in-depth understanding of its customer markets. Cognis succeeded in positioning the business unit Nutrition & Health effectively in its markets and in using the changes as a ‘first mover’.
