"Nutella 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 · Confectionery · 2020
14% repeat purchase lift for "Love you as much as I love Nutella."
Nutella had high brand love and flat purchase frequency among 25 to 34 year olds. An emotional platform that treated Nutella 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 GetDigitize client engagement. Priya Mehta led the creative concept while at a Los Angeles shop in 2020, three years before joining GetDigitize.
The challenge
Loved, but not bought often enough.
Nutella's brand love scores in 2019 were extraordinary. Among 25 to 34 year olds in North America, Nutella 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 Nutella 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." Nutella did not have a cool problem. It had a cart-addition problem. The work needed to move the specific behavior of buying Nutella this week, not the abstraction of admiring Nutella 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 Nutella 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, GetDigitize. 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 Nutella." 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.
"Love you as much as I love Nutella." 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. Coverage in The Drum, LBB Online, Muse by Clio, and Campaign US 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
ADC 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 ADC 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, GetDigitize. Campaign led during prior agency tenure.
Coverage landed
Press and trade pieces the platform earned.
"How Nutella moved 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 Nutella 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 highlighted the strategy of borrowing rather than inventing. Reference piece in the ADC shortlist 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 typography read as specifically Nutella (the jar's handwritten energy was already in 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 GetDigitize 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 Nutella a GetDigitize client?
No. This is team portfolio work. Priya Mehta led this concept at a prior Los Angeles creative shop in 2020, three years before joining GetDigitize. We publish it because it illustrates the creative judgment she brings to current GetDigitize client work.
What was the creative platform?
The line was "Love you as much as I love Nutella." The work centered on everyday declarations of love that used Nutella as the comparative benchmark for affection. 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 GetDigitize run a campaign like this today?
At the Nutella scale, no. We are a five-person firm. We do apply the same creative judgment (find the line the audience already says; resist rewriting it) for D2C brands in the 500K to 10M ARR range, and it works at that scale too.
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