As part of a major brand overhaul including new packaging and entree options, Nestle brand Lean Cuisine has changed up its advertising with a move away from weight loss marketing with new broadcast and social campaigns.
The broadcast campaign, “Feed Your Phenomenal” (featured above), launches early next month with a 30-second spot by Grey. Grey’s spot depicts a hard-working maternity nurse in Boston who looks forward to the end of her shift, at 3:23 AM,when she can finally take a breather and enjoy a Lean Cuisine mac and cheese meal. She credits lean cuisine with helping her maintain a healthy lifestyle and “eat the way I want to eat,” despite her hectic schedule. Nonsensical tagline aside, the spot does move away from the brand’s typical association with diet and weight loss, and if its claim that it is part of a “healthy lifestyle” is far-fetched it at least presents one accurate selling point in its fitting in with a busy schedule.
360i’s social campaign, which precedes the broadcast effort, takes on the scale more directly. A 2:25 video, entitled “#WeighThis,” opens with the question “How much do you weigh?’ as a moderator tells a group of women, “I want you to approach the scale.” The catch? The women don’t step on the scael to weight themselves, but instead weigh their biggest accomplishment, which varies from a backpack representing trips around the world to a college textbook signyfying a middle aged woman’s fresh start to divorce papers to a single mother’s Dean’s List certificate, accompanied by the message, “If you’re going to weigh something, weigh what matters.” The spot ends by inviting viewers to share how they’d like to be weighed with the hashtag, #WeighThis.
Lean Cuisine brand manager Chris Flora told AdAge that the new campaign represented a “massive pivot” for the brand, which consumers “most closely associate…with being a diet brand,” adding, “But we recognize that diets are dead and we want to show that we are truly shifting away from diet.” The new campaign follows about a year and a half in which the brand was largely absent from marketing while it considered a new strategy. “We didn’t really have a brand soul,” Flora explained, “for us to really thrive in this marketplace we wanted to find that brand soul.”