🍏 Too Good To Go: From 0 to 700,000 users in 2.5 years
5 marketing secrets on how we turned the start-up Too Good To Go into a global movement against food waste and what you can learn from it for your green marketing.
➡️ You can also listen to this posting in my podcast 🎧
For 2.5 years, I was able to help shape the Too Good To Go brand as Head of Marketing. In the beginning, in true start-up style, I went to the restaurants myself to convince them to save food from going to waste with us and often heard "Who? Too Good To What?".
Hi 👋 I’m Florian Schleicher. This is the FutureStrategies newsletter. Thank you so much for reading along 💚
Brand awareness = 0
Users = 0
Partners = 0
Little by little, we managed to win over the market, and when I took my next step after two and a half years and founded my company FUTURES, my team and I could look back on an incredible marketing success story:
From 0 to over 700,000 users
Increase in supported brand awareness from 0 to 54%
1,400 press articles about the brand in 2021
Creation of the top 6 Instagram brand account with 12,000 followers
230,000 newsletter sign-ups and 340,000 push notification recipients
So today, let's look at how we did it - with all my perspectives and experiences from my role:
Successful go-to-market launch communication
Building the community (social + CRM)
Press work that continuously generates reach
Campaigns that embody the vision and attract target groups
Building a team of experts
1️⃣ Successful go-to-market launch communication
My journey as Head of Marketing began in the summer of 2019. As the second employee after our Country Manager, my first task was to prepare and execute the launch of our app.
We were given a few tools and methods from our HQ in Copenhagen to tackle the launch, but essentially we were given every freedom, expressed by my boss with a simple "You are the expert for your market - you will know what's best."
What might be too much of a blank sheet of paper for others, immediately motivated me to take action - with learnings from 4 years at the agency and my marketing work at McDonald's and Greenpeace, I had a full know-how case with me and already had a rough road map in my head.
It quickly became clear that we were going to put all our eggs in one basket for the launch:
PR - press relations. Because Too Good To Go had a decisive advantage...
The app's founders recognized a key customer need - people are overwhelmed by the climate crisis. They want to do something about it, but they don't know what they can do in their everyday lives and are looking for simple ways. At the same time, we know that food waste is omnipresent, even though nobody likes to throw food away.
We use this insight, this understanding of our target group, as the basis for our launch and our go-to-market strategy, because without this problem-solving approach, we would have fallen into the number one marketing trap.
“The more you can cater your communication style to that of your intended audience, the more effective your message will be. It is important to understand not only the preferences and needs of one’s customers, but their communication style as well. Sharp brands pay painstaking attention to customers vocabulary.”
Matt Johnson & Prince Ghuman in Blindsight
The same insight was, we assumed, also relevant for journalists: They too are frustrated with only writing about bad news around the climate crisis, so they are looking for good and local news stories that are worth telling.
So we prepared our launch for almost two months, planned a press release together with a PR freelancer, and a press event for journalists, and drew up distribution lists for the right approach to the right media.
In other words, full focus on PR.
Why?
