Work
Frank And Honest - You Can't Fake Great Tasting Coffee
THE ASK
Gourmet coffee company, Frank and Honest, the Musgrave brand exclusively available in SuperValu and Centra, tasked THINKHOUSE with making it the coffee brand for Irish coffee lovers by building awareness, trial and differentiation with unique youth marketing strategies. As the brand’s creative and strategic agency partner, our role is to build this young brand’s Frank and Honest personality and give people a reason to choose it as their coffee brand of choice.
THE APPROACH
Our strategy & planning team identified the following insight: In an increasingly confusing and complex world, people want the truth, something that makes life less complicated and more real. From this came the proposition: ‘Having a Frank and Honest coffee cuts through the noise of life, serving a refreshing dose of honesty that makes any day a little better.’ The message is simple, when you’ve got great tasting coffee, you don’t need to bullshit. You can #BeMoreFrankAndHonest.
THE OUTPUT
As a first step, we revisited and refreshed the brand bible and tone of voice to maximise the brand’s appeal and relevance. To drive sales and win against competitors, we developed a new social, digital, cinema and OOH strategy designed to maximise reach and connect with people’s everyday coffee moments in a refreshingly honest way. Our photography, film, design and copywriting teams got to work – putting ‘realness’ front and centre whilst telling our brand’s amazing quality story in a humorous way that’s relevant for today’s savvy audience.
On our social channels, we adopted a reach and frequency model which meant reaching more people more frequently than before. By using video wherever possible, while embracing all the placements across Facebook and Instagram. As a result, reach, video consumption, engagements, and organic performance all grew.
This fresh approach to the brand’s creative culminated in the launch of a major new advertising campaign ‘Be More Frank and Honest... You Can’t Fake Great Tasting Coffee’. The campaign was ideated, developed, cast, written, directed, produced and edited by our in-house team and poked fun at the (often) over-filtered, over-stylized and over-dramatic world of advertising with a 30 second cinema ad and a full suite of OOH and digital assets.
The cinema ad takes viewers behind the curtains of ‘the crazy world of coffee advertising’ in an over-the-top shoot with special effects teams, mood & lighting experts, food stylists, and voice over artists – dramatising the story that you can make something look good, but ‘you can’t fake great tasting coffee.’
THE OUTCOME
With over a million unique social users reached per month, at a high frequency while maintaining engagement rates of over 12%, we delivered outstanding brand growth, sales and awareness for this young brand.
According to Red C, awareness grew from 36% to 49% during Q2-Q4 of 2018 when Thinkhouse took over the account.
“What an incredible first year it’s been working with Thinkhouse. As our creative partners, they have made changes across all our communications and delivered a long-term strategy that is cutting through in a fun way. I look forward to seeing where this creative partnership takes us in 2019 and beyond.” - Rosemary Walsh, Marketing Manager, Frank and Honest