The Media Plan: How Nespresso is tackling its sustainability image problem

How does a disposable coffee pod brand use media to get across the message that it does have sustainable credentials and is not an enemy of the environment?

That was the challenge facing the category leader, Nespresso, whose brand is most known for George Clooney ads and sleekly-designed machines. According to  The Guardian, 14 billion Nespresso capsules are sold annual as of last year, both online and from 810 boutiques in 84 countries. More than 400 Nespressos are drunk every second.

The problem the Nestlé brand faced was that looking at Nespresso’s brand-tracking, while it was doing a lot for sustainability, it was not particularly well-known for it, Richard Kirk chief strategy officer for Zenith told Mediatel News.

In fact, Nespresso wants to get to every cup of coffee to be ‘Carbon Neutral’ by 2022 and the main purpose of its branded content partnership with The Guardian was to show people its sustainability credentials. The brand also wants to encourage its customers to recycle the pots, which in turn could facilitate additional recycling in their wider routines.

As Kirk recently explored in a column for Mediatel News, media planners need to look at emissions of their advertising more, and this was a key consideration in the strategy behind choosing media to get out Nespresso’s message about sustainability.

Carbon-conscious planning for print and  online

Zenith, brand owner Nestlé’s media agency, opted to use a mix of traditional and digital media to focus on lower carbon emissions in executing the campaign while promoting Nespresso’s sustainability credentials.

The agency ensured the 28-page editorial supplement put in The Observer and boutiques was made from recycled paper while also being widely recyclable and they complemented this by using digital platforms to drive reach with a lower carbon footprint compared to a traditional supplement and other higher carbon-emitting media options.

Kirk explained: “The main part of the traditional media is a supplement which went out in The Observer called Grounded, which we saw was a really high-dwell-time piece of media that allows us to communicate all those passion points that Nespresso has around coffee, while also building its credentials around coffee quality.”

The Grounded supplement would also appeal to younger readers in particular, Kirk added, because they are generally more conscious about the choices they face as consumers when buying coffee, such as a product’s environmental impact as well as its price and taste.

Notably, sustainability was also central to the digital element of the media plan: “The digital stuff was to build more reach and was lower emissions so instead of doing lots more reach and lots more print, instead we went for digital,” Kirk explained. “We tried to optimise the file sizes to be as small as possible to reduce the emissions because we know that in digital advertising it is file size that determines emissions.”

There is now more evidence about the impact of online ads on carbon emissions. Good-Loop, the purposeful ads platforms, launched a carbon footprint calculator in June that shows how a typical online ad campaign would emit 5.4 tonnes of carbon dioxide – which is close to being under half (43%) of the average annual carbon footprint of a person in the UK.

Flywheel effect on consumers

Zenith planned and executed the media for this campaign after a “client confidential” where the agency invites a specific set of media owners that it thinks fits with a client  give them deep brief on a particular problem that the client is facing.

Kirk explained: “At Nestlé as a group they are not just focused on sustainability, but they’re passionate about it. They think that coffee can be a force for good because every stage of the production process on the on the farm because there’s an opportunity to do something good on the sustainability front to pull something back as opposed to simply taking.”

For example, on the cultivation side, Nespresso has the opportunity to reduce soil erosion and improve habitat by avoiding poor farming and over coffee production, along with sustainability considerations in the supply chain to bear in mind.

“The feeling is that if Nespresso is seen as a really sustainability-focussed business, then when you’re buying from that business… you will make the consumer feel more motivated to recycle and join them on that mission around sustainability”, he said.

Targeting and effectiveness

The reasoning behind choosing The Guardian to put out a branded content supplement was two-fold.

Firstly, The Guardian Labs has a focus on climate change journalism and sustainable business practices and fulfilled target audience and scale criteria for Nespresso with progressive, middle-class, slightly wealthier-than-average homeowners who tend to be more aligned with this sustainability message.

Kirk explained: “The goal is to try and improve those associations with sustainability and the best place to do that is with people who share an agenda because they’re more likely to pick it up and read it so we’re really on sort of low-hanging fruit part of the audience at the moment.”

Secondly, the 28-page supplement was “more effective” to do justice to the extent of Nespresso’s green practices as Kirk maintained if you can build a partnership and talk in detail and at length about all that you are doing for sustainability then it communicated to customers that you are implicitly more genuine and credible, compared to a short above-the-line campaign on broadcast media.

“It shows that there’s like some real depth of thinking and depth of action behind what they are talking about,” Kirk added. “It is actually happening and they are actually doing these things. It is not just a lot of goals that they set themselves and they have got the initiatives in place”

He said in terms of effectiveness, it is based around those associations with the topic of sustainability rather than machine sales.

Zenith will be comparing exposed and non-exposed groups and examining the change in perception between the two, and then contrasting with a previous spot campaign using the same methodology.