New Panera campaign emphasizes values

Panera Bread Co. has launched a new “Live Consciously. Eat Deliciously.” marketing campaign that highlights its values and philanthropy while promoting the quality of its food.

The 1,652-unit St. Louis-based bakery-café chain has amped up its marketing budget over the past year, and its latest effort stands as the centerpiece of the push.

The platform, which debuted in February, was created by the Chicago-based Cramer-Krasselt agency, which Panera hired last year. It features a variety of channels: national cable and local television, digital video and display, social media, and, this month, print. The company said its 2013 budget for this campaign is approximately 30 percent more than last year’s spend.

“This is an expression of what we stand for as a company, our soul,” Panera chief marketing officer Michael Simon told Nation’s Restaurant News. “In many ways, this has been with us for the 30 years of our existence, but we’ve been very inner-directed. If you were an employee, you knew the things we do. But we’ve never shared it more broadly.”

Simon added that the new platform has a “playful, charming nature,” — including a commercial that features an intricate Rube Goldberg device — while conveying a serious message. Besides, he added, “Everybody loves a Rube Goldberg device.”

Simon broke down the campaign for Nation’s Restaurant News.

Why is now a good time to shift to the ‘Live Consciously’ focus?

This is about how we feel. There was a type of humility. But as we looked at the context of restaurant advertising — which tends to be focused on beautiful food photography or value or discounts — we had been playing in the more functional space, talking about how great our food was. It was clear that while we thought we had a more authentic space in telling our food story and thought we romanced it more, customers were hearing the same thing from everyone. We had this great story.

If you look across the spectrum of restaurant advertising, it’s very different...our message around values and living consciously, I think stands out.

How does it touch consumers?

It’s not just about our social responsibility. It’s really across everything we do, from how we compete to how we work together as an organization and also how we exercise our competencies for good. What we wanted to do is say, rather than, “Our soups, salads and sandwiches are better than the restaurant across the street,” is to really try to connect with consumers around shared values, on people who make conscious choices each day to elevate their own lives and those of friends and family around them.

What is the core of the message?

We as a company made all these conscious decisions, like baking fresh bread from fresh dough daily in our 1,600 cafes. To do that, we had to make the choice to build a national fresh dough facility infrastructure. We had to hire and train 3,000 bakers who get up every night at 11 or 12 o’clock and bake fresh bread and sweet breads for each café. And then at the end of the day, whatever isn’t sold is donated to food banks and hunger organizations.

It was our conscious decision to move away from deli meat to antibiotic-free meat that’s made with a sous vide cooking method.

You also emphasize Panera’s role in the community.

Last year we donated over $100 million in bread. That inspired us to open the Panera Cares Cafes. These are all conscious decisions we have made to elevate the lives of our customers and the folks who work with us.

Goal of the new campaign

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What do want the effect of the campaign to be on customers?

I want to take more of our customers from ‘preference’ to ‘love.’ We have customers who prefer us because we make good soups, salads and sandwiches. It’s a good place for lunch or breakfast. But in our research, we found customers had no idea about how Panera behaved and acted. That makes them want to go more, because they found we share their values.

Are there larger issues?

Over the past decade, there’s been a lot of poor behavior by corporations, from Enron to the financial services industry, and some of the things in the restaurant industry — the level of brand trust in companies has declined by half in the past decade. If people see companies authentically operate in conscious ways and that they are more values-based, they want to do business with those companies.

We’ve seen it resonate very much with Millennials, but we’ve also had a strong relationship with Baby Boomers as well. Our customer is female-skewed, so it also plays well to a female audience. A key factor for Millennials in making decisions is how you source and how you give back.

The commercial itself is very intricate. What were the challenges in producing it?

You know how the St. Louis Arch was built? It was two sides that met in the middle. There were pieces of this Rube Goldberg that didn’t work exactly as planned, but it did when it went around completely. ... We’re really happy with the end result.

Were there any changes in your media buy for this ad?

We’ve shifted a little more to television. It executes well across all our mediums. It does a good job in digital. It doesn’t resonate as well in more static channels like out-of-home or print. We know from our own analytics that television and digital are more productive mediums for us.

The Rube Goldberg also is at your microsite.

That contraption lets people engage. We’re continuing to push this strategic idea about how the more good you put into something, the better the outcome.

What’s next for the Panera campaign?

We’ve actually shot four commercials that tell different stories about different conscious decisions that we’ve made. So we have stories in the future about sourcing. We have stories about our approach to baking fresh bread daily. And we even have a story around our environment, which is another differentiator for us. We made some very conscious decisions about how Panera is designed — the colors, the fabrics and even the fact that we don’t use plastic forks and plates. … The others have Rube Goldberg contraptions too, but they are different from the one you’ve seen.

Contact Ron Ruggless at [email protected].
Follow him on Twitter: @RonRuggles