The art of getting Norwegians to try a new taco

Norwegians love tacos! A quarter of us have a regular weekly taco day. In fact, the Friday taco is almost sacred. But it's possible to expand the repertoire. Just ask Santa Maria and Aller Media.

When Santa Maria wanted to expand Norwegians' taco habits, Aller Media had to balance between the familiar - and the new and exciting. Taco with Asian beef? Salmon taco? Sure, as long as no one touched the classic with ground beef!

- This is exactly what the customer knew: Most of us love the classic Friday taco. More than that, in fact - it's sacred! We weren't going to mess with it. The focus of the campaign was therefore to communicate that it is possible to eat tacos several days a week. And with different ingredients and a different twist.

This is according to Maja Vuleta Babic, Key Account Manager at Aller Media.

The vast majority of readers of KK.no and Dagbladet.no are familiar with the appearance of Santa Maria products. They have a clear logo and a familiar profile that sets them apart from the retail chains' own taco products.

- Santa Maria has its own look and feel, and Aller Concept Store was very good at working with this. We managed to keep Santa Maria top of mind, so that readers will hopefully seek out Santa Maria for more recipes and ideas the next time they need inspiration.

The main goal of the campaign was partly to showcase the new addition to the range - Mini Tubs - and partly to inspire Dagbladet.no users to try out new taco varieties.

- Which readers' taco habits did you want to refresh?

- Simply EVERYTHING!

Video production in the corona era

The campaign should have been run earlier than it was, but the coronavirus situation got in the way. It wasn't easy to cook new taco dishes and make films for the articles when the whole country shut down in the spring of last year.

- There was simply a lot of uncertainty about how things would develop, and we didn't get to meet. So everything was put on hold until we knew more about the development of the corona situation," says Babic.

But then came the fall after a summer where the infection rate had dropped. Santa Maria decided that now was the time.

- We reached production just before another lockdown," says Babic.

This meant that Santa Maria's recipe for salmon tacos and tacos with Asian beef could be put into practice - and Aller Media readers could be inspired by tempting movies.

- Video has become an important element in all our stories, from news to entertainment. Therefore, it was quite natural that video should be part of the taco articles as well. We also knew from previous experience that food is a grateful topic to show in the form of moving images.

Classic tacos are still king of the pile

As the results came in during the campaign and afterwards, it was easy to see that Dagbladet.no readers prefer the classic ground beef taco. But there was also a lot of interest in fish tacos and an Asian variant.

- Absolutely! Both articles with the new taco recipes were very well read and we were either at or above the benchmark in terms of clicks. We got just over 50,000 clicks on the articles. But we can draw the conclusion that readers prefer the meat taco.

- Why do you think that is?

- One explanation could be the demographics of our readers. We see a lot of families with children, and when you're cooking for the whole family, meat can be a little easier than fish, especially when there are children involved. Now I'm speaking from my own experience!

Marketing Manager at Santa Maria, Kine Kotte, says that they were delighted with the campaign, and states: "Many people in Aller have probably got some new taco favorites after the collaboration, and we like that!"

- The whole team working on the campaign discovered some news and were very good at sharing it with the customer in the form of images. The advantage for the FMCG category during the corona period is that many have done very well. Santa Maria is one of them," says Maja Vuleta Babic.

- I'm very pleased with the job the team did. The campaign confirmed that the customer's trust in us and me was confirmed, that we created results. We at Aller look forward to the next collaboration with Santa Maria!