Potatoes USA announced a new consumer marketing campaign at their Annual Meeting in Denver last week. The “What Are You Eating?” campaign is designed to encourage athletes to use potatoes as fuel for athletic performance. The campaign is designed to re-frame potato nutrition messaging from providing reasons why it is ok to eat potatoes to providing the reasons why you should eat potatoes for optimal athletic performance.
Through a process of reviewing and analyzing potato characteristics and their implications, Athletic Performance was identified as the single-minded, lifestyle-oriented potato benefit that could best serve to strengthen the industry’s position in the marketplace.
Talking to athletes represents a huge opportunity for the potato industry, 16% of the population or 30 million people exercise at least 2 times per week and participate in competitive events. This performance athlete segment of the population will be the initial target audience but will be expanded to include the 84 million people who regularly exercise and eventually encompass everyone with an active lifestyle.
The “What Are You Eating?” campaign, capitalizes on the internal competition of athletes, constantly training with the goal of doing better each day than the day before. The campaign will celebrate moments of personal achievement and showcase the intensity and drive of athletes, all with the help of potatoes as fuel. All campaign executions will include the key positioning line, “Potatoes. Real Food. Real Performance” as well as call-out key potato nutrients.
The “What Are You Eating?” campaign will launch in July 2018 and will be integrated across all Potatoes USA’s marketing programs and will include social media advertising, nutrition and athletic performance influencer education, media relations, recipe and content development, consumer and influencer events, and strategic partnerships.