Safefood

Reducing food poisoning by driving a behavioural tipping point.

Brief

To combat food poisoning from undercooked meat, safefood had promoted the ‘Three Checks’ (no pink meat, food is piping hot, juices run clear) for decades, but by 2020, only 1% of cooks in Ireland did all ‘three checks’ when cooking, according to safefood’s in-depth research.

In 2022, safefood changed their approach to promoting use of meat thermometers by home cooks as a more effective approach. However, this meant promoting a completely new consumer behaviour – a huge challenge for a campaign on a tight budget.

How on earth could we get Ireland excited about a boring gadget?

Insight

The campaign needed to flip convention on its head. The creative messaging was all about tapping into what cooks want most - to be the star of their kitchen among friends and family by cooking tasty meals. This meant being more carrot than stick.

For the media strategy, it became clear that this safefood campaign needed to act differently. Ownership of meat thermometers in Ireland had been slowly growing – from 2% in 2002, to 17.4% by 2020. The diffusion of innovation theory holds that any new technology goes mainstream after ownership reaches 14% of a population. We were at a tipping point, but we suspected an awareness campaign wouldn’t be enough. Our ‘aha!’ moment came when we discovered one crucial fact – with a usage gap of only 1.7%, it was clear that: people who bought meat thermometers, used them.

Therefore, this campaign needed to be less worthy and act much more ike a disruptive commercial brand competing to maximise sales at times of greatest commercial opportunity.

Strategy & campaign

Our strategy was to position meat thermometers as the must-have kitchen gadget so that as many people as possible bought and, therefore, used a meat thermometer, and to do this with a tried-and-tested, commercial sales funnel approach instead of a worthy but dull public health awareness campaign.

With a small budget, we concentrated on those most likely to convert. We targeted 2.4m ‘Housepeople’ and 732,000 ‘Housepeople with Children’, who showed strong motivation to improve their Christmas & BBQ cooking rituals.

Results

We set out to prove the diffusion of innovation theory with a hard-nosed commercial media strategy to drive the key behaviour that unlocked safer cooking behaviours.

We proved we were at that tipping point because, over two years, the campaign doubled ownership of meat thermometers - taking it beyond early adopters into the early majority. By increasing ownership from 17% to 36%, we made meat thermometers truly mainstream.

Awards

🏆 Silver Award for Long-term Effectiveness - Media Awards 2023

🏅 Shortlisted - Effies Ireland 2024