S-market, a Finnish grocery store chain with a mission: everyone has to be able to eat well to an affordable price. But they were struggling to differentiate and to be on the top-of-mind among families with kids.

S-market decided to promote kids healthy eating. To bring back joy to kids dining.

The objective was to build children a healthy relationship towards food and to help parents in dietary stress and confusion. Give them inspirational tools to feed their kids.

When brands talk about healthy eating habits it is often extremely serious. Figures, facts and counter-facts. People normally hear about what specific food they should or shouldn’t eat.

Our goal was to take no food off the table and encourage people to take up a versatile diet, not a restrictive one.

We wanted to make eating and shopping for groceries fun again and let peoples’ childlike imagination live again. The creative idea was to create characters that re-presented different parts of your stomach that you have to feed evenly. And if you don’t, all hell breaks loose.

S-foodmarket wanted to help families with children with their everyday healthy food issues.

The convention is that most communication on healthy nutrition feels like teaching or even preaching. Facts and counter-facts crisscross each other and it’s hard to know what’s right and what’s wrong. This is especially hard for families trying to responsibly raise up their children.

Our strategy was to move from preaching to stories that make versatile eating interesting again. We wanted to create a concept that fosters conceptions, since imagination makes everything more fun. We created characters that toyed with their imagination with fun stories relatable for both parents and kids reminding them that food is fun, but you need to feed all your stomachs.

Instead of preaching we created characters as ambassadors for children’s every nutritional need. Broccomus, representing the Fruit/veggie stomach. Wobble, representing the Meat/seafood stomach. Chocombo, representing the Dessert/snack stomach. And Softling representing the Grain/wheat stomach. If you only fed one of them, there was going to be one hell of a fight in your stomach. By eating in a versatile way each character gets its share.

We created stuffed animals of all of the characters to be sold in S-foodmarkets. This was key to build long lasting effect and drove the attitude and behavior change. The characters made it easy for the struggling parents to talk about sensitive food related issues with their kids and brought joy to exploring all kinds of foods and flavours.

To bring the characters live we amplified the message via TV- & online-channels, movietheaters and most importantly in the S-market themselves from May 2018 onwards.

The stuffed animals disappeared from S-markets with a record speed.

In only 10 weeks the attitudes changed. Before characters were introduced only few per cent linked healthy (6%) and versatile (7%) eating to S-market. After this activation 41% of parents linked healthy and 26% to versatile eating to S-market.

Half year after the initial campaign we made up followup which showed the KPI’s were still increasing. In January 2019 over 60% of parents linked S-market to children’s healthy eating. S-market was also seen as an author of versatile and healthy nutrition. Something that would never been possible before Eatmagination.

According to Nielsen S-market sales increased over 3% in 2018.

All this by changing the view point, creating inspiring characters (which people paid for to see our advertising in their homes daily) and telling the whole story in compelling animation.

Most importantly we started the conversation of children’s healthy nutrition.