The Häagen-Dazs brand, which is licensed to Dreyer’s Grand Ice Cream, is continuing to raise awareness about the decreasing population of honeybees, on a social site called ExperienceProject.com (EP).
The “Help The Honey Bee” campaign, which runs through August, is a new social networking effort that is being used to reach consumers that care about honey bees and connect them with the Häagen-Dazs brand and to educate Häagen-Dazs fans about the dying honey bee populations. To do so, the brand teamed up with ExperienceProject.com (EP) an online social destination centered around social issues. EP already has a group of users concerned about honeybees and this effort targets these consumers.
“We already had a honey bee group that is very active on our site before we started talking to Häagen-Dazs,” said Armen Berjikly, founder of Experience Project. “The idea is about inserting the brand into a conversation that already exists and connecting them with a community of passionate people. By doing it this way, it is not contributed and more likely to be accepted by users.”
The new effort follows Häagen-Dazs’s existing efforts to push awareness around honeybees, which was created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners last year and ran online at www.helpthehoneybees.com.
“The new effort is aimed at reaching consumers in the social world who are already actively concerned about honey bees,” said Tonya Iles, Web manager at Dryers. “It is about reaching a like minded audience and consumer that isn’t aware of the Häagen-Dazs honeybee campaign but cares about the cause and connecting them with the brand.”
The campaign, which is now live in the EP.com social world at ExperienceProject.com/helpthehoneybees, lets consumers help save honey bees by entering contests and completing trivia games. It also lets a user create a personal challenge and track their progress in helping to save bees, rewarding completion of these personal challenges with prizes. “The goal is to look at the conversation about organic foods and bring the brand in there,” added Berjikly. “You can intersect the brand with the context and the consumers.”
One such challenge is the “Plant a Flower, Help a Honey Bee Challenge.” This game, calls consumers to plant a flower and then submit photos of themselves doing so to Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr, from which they will be automatically uploaded to the Häagen-Dazs page on Experience Project’s Web site. Users can go to the EP page and vote on their favorite pictures. The top three submissions will each win the grand prize of coupons for a year’s supply of free Häagen-Dazs ice cream.
Another challenge is the 7-Day Go Natural Challenge, which encourages consumers to only eat natural foods for seven days. Participants who join, will get an e-mail link to the Help The Honey Bees Web page, along with more details about the challenge itself and general tips on living healthy. In addition, participants will receive a coupon for Häagen-Dazs products. Those that complete the challenge will receive a gift certificate for a free eight-ounce carton of ice cream and the chance to win coupons for a year’s supply of free ice cream.
The EP page also hosts the Help The Honey Bees Trivia Game, in which users can learn about the issue and win points with their knowledge, which can then be donated to support of scientific research to help find the causes and solutions for Colony Collapse Disorder, an issue plaguing the bees.
To extend this effort beyond the EP site, the campaign is viral and can be shared across Facebook and Twitter.
