A 65-year-old soup brand and 760% ROAS: How King Soup captured younger shoppers on Appetise
“We knew King was a super strong brand, but the challenge for us was getting new younger shoppers to try our brand. The non-soup recipes have not only proved to be popular, they are less seasonal than soup. Its a win-win for us: more customers and wider purchase season.”
Susan Harvey, Marketing & Business Development Manager, Wilson Consumer Products
TLDR
- King dominates soup market share, but they wanted to get new, younger shoppers to try their products
- Working with Appetise, the brand found non-soup recipes proved to be both popular and less seasonal than soup
- This drove attributable ROI, with a 90% capture rate across 775 shopping events
Introduction
King is a New Zealand soup institution: a 65-year-old recipe holding close to 90% of the shelf-stable soup market, and two SKUs in the country's top ten. When a brand is that established, the growth question stops being awareness and becomes relevance. AKA, staying in the basket of a shopper who is planning dinner, not shopping the soup aisle.
The challenge
Wilson Consumer Products (the owner of King) came to us with a winter window and not much time to spare. Soup season in New Zealand runs hot through June and falls away after August, so the brief was to move fast and reach younger shoppers through recipes rather than advertising, and find out whether recipe-led discovery could give a 65-year-old brand a reason to be picked up by someone who has never bought it.
The approach
We launched 17 recipes, built around two hero SKUs: Country chicken as the nourishing winter play, and Hearty Vegetable Low Salt as the everyday workhorse. Deliberately, not all of the recipes were soup. Alongside the traditional slow-cooker vegetable and chicken soups sat cottage pie, beef enchiladas and a family mince base, testing whether shoppers would treat a soup mix as a meal base when they me tit at the moment they were deciding what to cook. Placements ran across recipes, search and swap, reaching 875 New Zealand households across 1401 product appearances.
What the data showed
- 90% capture rate across 775 recipe shops, against a 40% industry benchmark.
- Peak capture of 97% on Family Style Beef Enchiladas and 96% on Hearty Vegetable & Chorizo Soup.
- 62% conversion on Country Chicken and 58% on Hearty Vegetable Low Salt, confirming Low Salt as the range's volume driver.
- 760% return on ad spend.
- Two substitutions in ten weeks: one was a shopper moving between King SKUs, only one went to a competitor.
That last line is worth sitting with. Sponsored recipes pre-populate the brand's product, so the mechanic naturally produces more swap-outs than swap-ins. A near-empty substitution log is a harder result than it looks: given every opportunity to trade King out, shoppers didn't. An awesome outcome for all involved.
The bigger picture
The top recipe by volume wasn't a soup. Almighty Cottage Pie pulled more shops than anything else in the recipe set, with the enchiladas and mince base close behind. Wilson has spent years telling shoppers a soup mix can be a meal base, and watching most of them use it as-is anyway. Put the same idea in front of someone at the point they're deciding what's for dinner on Appetise, and it lands. The product didn't change – the moment did.
The wrap up
"We knew King was a super strong brand, but the challenge for us was getting new younger shoppers to try our brand. The non-soup recipes have not only proved to be popular, they are less seasonal than soup. Its a win-win for us: more customers and wider purchase season," Susan Harvey, Marketing & Business Development Manager, Wilson Consumer Products, says.
Thanks to the Wilson team for being a dream to work with on this!
