The Campaign

We brought the iconic brand line “Good things take time” to life with the Mainland 2,000-Piece Voucher. The voucher for free Mainland Cheese came in the form of a huge and difficult puzzle; one of the most notoriously time-consuming hobbies there is. The puzzles were created using macro shots of our cheese, making the already-tricky puzzles even harder, with large surface areas of all the same colour. The only way customers could redeem the voucher, and get their cheesy reward, was to send us a photo of the fully completed puzzle – proving, in the process, that good things really do take time.

The Brief

n/a

Creative Execution

The campaign launched on December 11th 2017, with a social post on Facebook calling our customers to apply for a 2,000-piece voucher, by telling us who they’d enlist to help them finish it. Almost 2,000 people applied, and a week later, our lucky cheese-lovers were chosen. Each was sent a Mainland 2,000-Piece Voucher in a tailor-made box, along with instructions on how to redeem it, and handy hints on how to complete it. To redeem the voucher for their cheesy prize, they had to send us a photo of the entirely finished puzzle. It took them a bit of time, a whole lot of effort, but – just like Mainland cheese – It was worth the wait.

Describe the success of the promotion with both client and consumer including some quantifiable results

We wanted to create a campaign that reinforced “Good things take time,” in a way that provoked high customer engagement. And with the 2,000-Piece Voucher, we did just that. Thousands of our fans applied to receive a voucher through Facebook, making it Mainland’s most successful campaign on social to date - seeing three times the engagement of the brand’s average Facebook promotion. And in the following weeks, those lucky customers chose to spend hundreds of hours of their own precious time, piecing the voucher together – all for the sake of free Mainland cheese. The record time for completion was a huge 45 hours, and by the end of the campaign period, the Mainland 2,000-Piece Vouchers had seen a staggering 40% redemption rate – beating the worldwide direct-mail average response rate by 809%.* *Based on Direct Marketing Association (DMA) 2017 Response Rate Report’s findings of an average 4.4% response rate.

Explain why the method of promotion was most relevant to the product or service

We all love cheese. And we put that love to the test, with the Mainland 2,000-Piece Voucher, a voucher in the form of a 2,000-piece puzzle that had to be put together to be redeemed. Puzzles are one of the most notoriously time-consuming games around, so this campaign called for a very high level of engagement. The puzzle demanded a long period of highly focused attention, often spanning weeks. Those who finished the voucher spent at least 40 hours each on it; an astonishing level of brand engagement and interaction, showing how deeply immersed in the campaign our customers were.

The target audience for Mainland encompasses all Kiwi cheese-lovers aged 25-69. It’s a broad audience, and a tricky one to capture. They’re busy young professionals. They’re full-on families. They’re newly retired with a fresh lease on life. It’s very difficult to get these busy cheese fans to interact with Mainland – and even trickier to get them to interact with us over an extended period of time. So we wanted to create something truly engaging. Something that would not only compel them to spend time with the brand – but to actually choose to spend hours and hours with us, in their own homes, over a period of several weeks. To add an extra layer of relevance, we chose to release the campaign in the lead-up to the Christmas holidays - tapping into an existing behaviour, as many Kiwis already enjoy making puzzles during their holiday breaks.