How Foodpanda used social media during Women's Day marketing activity

Category Introduction

The online food delivery service is a growing industry in India and the food technology sector is estimated to hit $2.5B by the year 2021 from it’s current size of about $700M. The sector is growing at a rate of nearly 15% quarter-on-quarter in terms of daily food orders.

Brand introduction

One of India’s leading food delivery platform, Foodpanda boasts of more than 20K plus Restaurants across 150+ cities in India and was acquired by Ola in December 2017 for 1300Crores.

Summary

Talking about how women are objectified by describing them with names typically associated with food, Foodpanda aimed to spark a conversation and spread awareness on social media that women are Not A Piece Of Meat.

Roping in influential celebrities, Huma Qureshi and Neha Dhupia to support the cause on International Women's Day, the brand leveraged social media to propagate the cause and urge people to use of such words should always be to describe food and food only.

Brief

To integrate the connection between Foodpanda, and International Womens Day, touching upon an issue that continues to plague women across the country with a clutter breaking campaign.

Problem Statement/Objective

People often use words for women that are used to describe food such as ‘hot, saucy, teekhi, smokin’ and so on which puts women through the terrible ordeal of objectification and cat calling. These words when used in such a way lose their innocence and represent vulgarity and indecent behaviour towards women. Communicating to social media audiences that the use of such words was morally indecent and demeaning was the brand’s objective with Not A Piece Of Meat.

Challenges

Breaking through the clutter of all the equally well intentioned International Women's Day campaigns on social media which required Foodpanda to find, and collaborate with the right Influencers to amplify their message.

Making a conscious, productive and impactful effort towards the eradication of the problem through their campaign was another challenge that the brand intended to conquer.

Execution

Activity on Foodpanda’s official Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram pages began on International Women’s Day with an inaugurative video that featured the female employees at Foodpanda holding up cards with several different words written on each.

https://www.facebook.com/foodpanda.in/videos/1681882268535319/

Words such as ‘Namkeen, Saucy, Chatpati, Sizzling and more’ were held up by women letting the viewers know that these words were offensive when used for women (or any human for that matter), and should only be used to describe food. The campaign hashtag for Not A Piece Of Meat was revealed at the end of the video.

https://www.instagram.com/p/BgEC6kulrAm/?taken-by=foodpandaindia

Also Read: Foodpanda appoints Anshul Khandelwal as Head – Marketing

The onset of the campaign then was accentuated by bringing some prominent Bollywood celebrities on board who have a strong voice and feel for the issue. Foodpanda brought Neha Dhupia and Huma Qureshi on board to amplify the message and post pictures on their social platforms with the hashtag Not A Piece Of Meat.

#NotAPieceOfMeat

Repost from Instagram: @NehaDhupia pic.twitter.com/4bbWsAxnFX

— foodpanda India (@foodpandaIndia) March 8, 2018

“For us at Foodpanda, it is very important to communicate directly with our audience and spread awareness on issues that mean something to us. We often notice women being described in a way we describe food, like juicy, spicy, saucy, etc. Being a brand related to the food category we feel that it is our responsibility to address this issue. With Not A Piece Of Meat we wanted to highlight the fact that women are not supposed to be objectified in any way.

They are much more than these words which are often used to describe them. We will always be addressing issues like these, not only because it is the right thing to do, but because we believe in it,” says Anshul Khandelwal, Head of Marketing, Foodpanda.

Results

Not A Piece Of Meat managed to generate a Reach of more than 3 Lakh, creating Engagemens to the tune of 40K across all the social media platforms.

The campaign also delivered over 3 Lakh Impressions, racking up more than 75K views on Facebook, 2.4K views on Instagram and 1252 views on Twitter.

Not A Piece Of Meat also helped Foodpanda capture a positive sentiment around their initiative, and the campaign was reported and organically picked up by numerous