The previous post outlines a rationale to embark on a Mediterranean cuisine-inspired internet marketing promotion and contest aimed at strengthening Sun Basket’s position as the leading online-only meal kit brand. The ideal target customers for this promotion/contest are high-earning women, since they are more likely to try the Mediterranean specialty diet and also have the resources to stay on as a customer, since a leading reason people leave meal kit services is the expense.
More specifically, there are two niche markets that are ideal: the audience of a mass-market food celebrity who is known to be Mediterranean-cuisine-friendly and a YouTube Mediterranean food chef with his/her own, sizable channel. Both audiences are the perfect source of new customers and the chefs leading those audiences are incentivized to work together to enhance their individual brands. Both audiences can be targeted through a Facebook promotion that would be very affordable because the audiences are so specific. Once you combine the targeted market of high-income women with people who have like pages dedicated to Mediterranean food, Mediterranean chefs, and the specific chefs involved in the promotion, the cost per action will be very low. The only other significant cost is bringing the chefs together for promotional videos and photos, which is relatively inexpensive, since it can be completed quickly and cheaply.
Table 1 below shows the highly targeted number of audience members per niche and/or brand.
| Category | Female Facebook Audience | Male Facebook Audience | Total Categories |
| “Mediterranean Diet Followers” Group | 27,491 | 18,328 | 45,819 |
| Rachel Ray | 243,940 | 162,627 | 406,567 |
| Akis Petretzikis | 499,265 | 332,843 | 832,108 |
| Sun Basket | 173,947 | 115,964 | 289,911 |
| Total Audiences | 944,643 | 629,762 | 1,574,405 |
Rachel Ray is a highly acclaimed celebrity chef who espouses the virtues of the Mediterranean diet (d’Estries, 2016) and has her own talk show and passionate audience. Akis Petretzikis is a popular YouTube chef with a loyal audience that is already engaged and excited about Mediterranean cuisine. The Sun Basket audience is already engaged with and excited about the brand and can participate in the promotion by exposing Sun Basket recipes to their friends and family. And finally, the overall topic of Mediterranean food on Facebook targets people who are already interested in or committed to this specialty diet.
So by the time the chefs sign on to create dedicated recipes for this Sun Basket promotion, there will be an excited audience ready to recreate the recipes and post videos about them for a chance to win one of the following prizes: (1) 50 winners of 2 months of free Sun Basket meals, (2) 10 winners of 6 months of free Sun Basket meals, and (3) 5 winners of 1 year of free Sun Basket meals, including a meet-and-greet meal with the two star chefs.
Total cost for this promotional event should not exceed $25,000, including marketing budget, celebrity endorsement payments, prizes, and video/photo shoot. This is a modest cost compared to the exposure on social media for Sun Basket. The YouTube videos created by entrants to the contest will serve as lasting “commercials” for the brand.
Post #3 in this series explores a legal dilemma of this promotion.
Reference
d’Estries, M. (2016, March 9). 5 celebrities who have benefited from the Mediterranean diet [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://www.fromthegrapevine.com/health/5-celebrities-who-have-benefited-mediterranean-diet
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