Use emotions to connect with millions on Instagram

By Laurence Gibbons

- Last updated on GMT

Instagram offers a platform for food and drink firms to connect with millions of consumers
Instagram offers a platform for food and drink firms to connect with millions of consumers

Related tags Cadbury dairy milk Cadbury plc Chocolate

Food and drink manufacturers should use emotions to connect their brands with a growing community of consumers on social media site Instagram, according to the site’s boss.

Instagram ads – which launched in the UK in September – provided the perfect platform for brands to visually inspire and connect with people, Alastair Cotterill, creative lead for Instagram Europe, Middle East, claimed.

“We know that people are moved by emotions,” ​he said. “Brands which want to be at the centre of visual inspiration and discovery need to think carefully about what emotion they want their content to evoke.

“We’re already seeing brands, such as John Lewis, Cadbury and Channel 4, harnessing the power of mobile in delivering against real business goals.”

‘Incredible opportunity’

The Instagram community has shared more than 30bn photos from around the world over the past four years, Cotterill claimed, creating an “incredible opportunity” ​for brands to connect with people in powerful new ways.

Key Instagram facts

  • More than 300M users on Instagram
  • More than 70M photos and videos shared daily
  • Instagram users ‘like’ more than 2.5bn photos each day
  • Instagram users shared more than 30bn photos in the past four years

“The visual web represents a continuing revolution in the way we communicate – it is a new language of images, stickers, videos and gifs ​[graphics interchange format] that is perfectly suited to the fast-paced, constantly connected world that mobile technology has created,” ​he added.

“Instagram is the perfect platform for this mobile, visual world.”

Cotterill praised Cadbury for using Instagram to build its brand, showcase its creativity and “successfully inspire”​ its audience.

The chocolate brand, owned by Mondelēz,​ wanted to build on its on-going TV and print campaign – ‘Free the joy’ – on Instagram.

Cadbury’s moments of joy

In the subsequent Instagram advert, the brand aimed to “elevate the creative feeling”​ around packaging and teamed up with a paper-folding artist to create “little moments of joy” ​using the wrappers of the various products in the Cadbury Dairy Milk range. 

These “light-hearted expressions”​ of joy were shot in a variety of everyday settings where people might enjoy a bar of chocolate. 

The campaign received an eight-point lift, with the strongest increase coming against the 25–35 years olds, which was the primary objective of the campaign.

On average, UK Instagram campaign performance produced three-times higher levels of ad recall against the Nielsen Online Ads average, he added.

Meanwhile, emoticons could be more effective than colour-coded nutritional labelling in encouraging responsible diets, a study led by Dr Milica Vasiljevic from the University of Cambridge and published in Appetite​ claimed .  

An emoticon is a pictorial representation of a facial expression, commonly used during non-verbal communication. 

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