A brand finds its love language in a focus-group quote
Feature piece on the creative process, from transcript to tagline. Quoted the creative team on resisting the urge to rewrite.
Team portfolio · Food · 2020
14% repeat purchase lift from a line the customers already said.
A global food brand had high brand love and flat purchase frequency among 25 to 34 year olds. An emotional platform that treated the product as the comparative benchmark for affection, rolled across OOH, social, and PR. Quiet, specific, and it moved the number.
A note on attribution. Team portfolio work, not a Digitize client engagement. Priya Mehta led the creative concept while at a prior agency in 2020, three years before joining Digitize. The brand is not named for confidentiality.
The challenge
Loved, but not bought often enough.
The brand's love scores in 2019 were extraordinary. Among 25 to 34 year olds in North America, it ranked in the top five brands for "loved" and "would recommend." And yet purchase frequency in the same cohort had been flat for three years. People loved the brand the way they love a song from their high school summer: warmly, occasionally, and without putting it in the grocery cart.
The brief was not "make us cool again." The brand did not have a cool problem. It had a cart-addition problem. The work needed to move the specific behavior of buying the product this week, not the abstraction of admiring the brand as a concept.
Traditional approaches had failed. A 2019 humor-led digital push had gotten engagement and zero purchase shift. A couponing trial moved trial but not repeat. The team needed an emotional hook that translated affection (which the brand had in spades) into a weekly behavior.
"People told us they loved this brand the way you love a place you used to live. The job was to move it from nostalgic to current. Not with louder marketing, with more honest marketing."Priya MehtaCreative director, Digitize. Platform led during prior agency tenure.
What the team did
Five steps toward a line that travels.
The insight came from a focus group transcript: a participant said she told her boyfriend she loved him as much as she loved the product. Everyone laughed. Then everyone said a version of it about their own person. The creative team walked out with a line that had already found its audience.
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Locked the platform on the spoken phrase.
The line came from the audience. The team did not workshop it into something cleverer. The work was to build around it without overwriting the warmth.
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Built OOH that read like notes between people.
Handwritten typography on 220 billboards across eight North American markets. The notes were from real couples, roommates, siblings, parents. The product logo sat small in the bottom corner. The work looked like it belonged to the people, not to the brand.
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Seeded 14 micro-films on social.
Two-minute social films of real people (cast from submissions) saying the line to someone they loved. No script doctor. No performative production. The result was a feed of small declarations. Engagement rates ran 3.4x the brand's 2019 social average.
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PR push framed the audience insight, not the ad.
Pitched trade and consumer press on the focus-group story: brand love does not equal purchase, and here is how one brand closed the gap with a phrase from its own customers. Advertising and creative trade coverage treated it as a craft story.
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Measured cart behavior weekly, not quarterly.
Retail partner data tracked repeat-purchase velocity in test DMAs versus control. Weekly readouts inside the ten-week window meant the team could see the lift building and pushed paid social into the top two performing creative cuts in week four.
The results
Love translated into cart.
14%
Repeat purchase lift, 25 to 34s
85M
Earned impressions
62%
Brand attribution, unbranded OOH
1
Creative awards shortlist
The 14 percent repeat purchase lift in the target cohort was the headline the retail team read. Brand attribution on the unbranded OOH (62 percent) was the craft-side number the creative team read. Both mattered. The work told the retail partners that emotional platform work could move a behavior number, which had been a debate inside the brand's measurement team for two years.
The awards shortlist was the cherry on top, not the point. The point was that the line came from the audience and the audience bought it back.
"The line already existed. We just stopped adding to it. Half of brand work is getting out of the way of a phrase people already use."Priya Mehta, creative director, Digitize. Campaign led during prior agency tenure.
Coverage landed
Press and trade pieces the platform earned.
Moving repeat purchase with one line
Analysis on brand-love-to-behavior translation. Used as a reference piece in category-marketing curriculum at two US business schools.
Behind the handwritten billboards
Production-focused piece on the typography choice, the casting of real couples, and the deliberate shrinking of the brand logo.
A phrase the audience already owned
Craft-focused feature highlighting the strategy of borrowing rather than inventing. Referenced in awards judging notes the following spring.
Honesty section
What surprised us.
The unbranded OOH was the surprise. Going in, the team expected brand attribution of about 35 percent on the minimal-logo billboards, based on category benchmarks. It came in at 62 percent. Interviews showed two things: the handwritten typography already matched the brand's visual memory, and the line itself functioned as a verbal logo. That changed how the team approached OOH for subsequent briefs at other clients, and it is a lesson we carry into Digitize work now. When a brand has strong visual memory, the logo is often doing less work than the typography.
About this case study
Common questions.
Is this brand a Digitize client?
No. This is team portfolio work. Priya Mehta led this concept at a prior creative agency in 2020, three years before joining Digitize. We withhold the brand's name for confidentiality. We publish the work because it illustrates the creative judgment she brings to current Digitize client work.
What was the creative platform?
Everyday declarations of love that used the product as the comparative benchmark for affection: people telling someone they loved them as much as they loved the brand. The line came from a focus-group transcript, not from a creative pitch.
How long did the campaign run in market?
Ten weeks across eight North American DMAs. Pre-production was six weeks. Post-campaign reporting ran three weeks. The platform itself continued beyond the initial 10-week window but measurement closed there.
What did the campaign cost?
Budget details are under NDA from the original agency relationship. Channel mix was OOH (55 percent of spend), social video (30 percent), and PR plus production (15 percent). Media was planned to compound on the earned side, which the 85M impression number validated.
Could Digitize run a campaign like this today?
Yes, for established consumer brands. We apply the same creative judgment (find the line the audience already says; resist rewriting it) for consumer and D2C brands at $10M or more in revenue, with tier-one PR leading and social, creators, and paid amplification built around it.
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