Project Overview
What do you get when you take the nation’s best-loved food retailer, the nation’s best-loved sport and a deep desire to help consumers up and down the country make healthier food choices?
A game-changing, integrated sponsorship campaign, boldly delivered to instantly capture the hearts and minds of adults and kids alike, and bring about real behavioural change, that’s what.
This is ‘Eat Well, Play Well’ from M&S Food.
Project Commissioner
Project Creator
Team
Client Services Director - Myrtle Doyle
Creative Director - Sean Dwyer
Design Director - Ashley Hodge
Head of Strategy & Copy - Tamsin Thom
Account Director - Ollie Gandy
Senior Designer - Ben Hutchings
Artworker - Callie Armitt
Project Brief
In 2022, M&S Food partnered with The Football Association in a never-been-seen-before sponsorship deal that uses the M&S Eat Well range and the power of football to help families make healthier food choices. The brief to Whippet? To create a sponsorship identity and campaign that would inspire and resonate across all touchpoints, drive recognition and understanding of Eat Well, and in turn help M&S to secure 50% of its sales through this range by the end of 2023.
Specifically, this identity would appear on touchpoints from store to social to stadium. With so many eyeballs on it, it needed to have immediate cut-through and relevance, be ownable to M&S and feel right for its customers.
Furthermore it needed to connect M&S Food to the four national football teams in a way that felt natural and have the potential to drive behavioural change.
Our scope included creative strategy, and development of creative assets including campaign line, partnership lock-up, photography style, graphic elements and tone of voice. The identity and campaign was rolled through pitch side hoardings, social, store windows, and all store POS (standee, event zone, competition collateral and bag for life).
Project Innovation/Need
Many food brands have associated themselves with football before, but often it’s done in a way that doesn’t feel relevant or natural. We spent a good chunk of time before creative therefore, thinking strategically about the best hierarchy and relationship between the three brands: M&S Food, Eat Well and the home nations, to ensure it felt credible. We netted out that Eat Well absolutely needed to be the lead, lending the campaign a product-first purpose that naturally fits the overarching idea that ‘if you eat well, you can play well too’.
Design Challenge
Our main design challenge for the visual identity was the tricksy one of how to combine three logos with food photography and player photography in a design scheme that feels healthy, foody and sporty, all at once.
Our solution is a dynamic and dramatic scheme – juxtaposing a vibrant and energetic gradient against a deeper, darker palette to create a striking visual identity – full of positive determination and refreshing change. To give further prominence to the Eat Well range, we created a sport-inspired pattern from the Eat Well sunflower, with the additional call to action line ‘follow the flower’ to signpost to the range. Tying it all together is a dynamic, curvy yellow and green super graphic, which really brings the design to life. Overall, the campaign shows the perfect balance between M&S Food, it’s Eat Well range and the emotive world of football. Now that’s what we call a hat trick.
Effectiveness
Results to date are unbelievable, Jeff.
M&S Food is the top scorer versus its competitor set when it comes to Health Perception which is up 2 percentage points since launch and up 1 percentage point year on year*
Sales of Eat Well products have improved since last season and are up 4 percentage points since launch**
Over 1 million pieces of free fruit & veg have been given away to kids in stores – that’s a new record for M&S Food as it inspires the next generation to Eat Well and Play Well.***
And the fan viewing figures are equally impressive, with 1 million visits to the campaign web pages since launch.
Advertising - Outdoor, Retail, POS
This award celebrates creative and innovative design for visual communication including traditional and digital signage intended to persuade an audience to purchase or take some action upon products, ideas or services. Consideration given to the technical, conceptual and aesthetic elements, audience engagement and message delivery.
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