Nudge Meets Neuro: marketing NanoSalad

Content Creation

Ogilvy's Behavioral Science Practice and neuroscience partner CloudArmy ran a one-day workshop at Nudgestock 2021 to find the packaging, colour and tagline cues that would make NanoSalad feel healthy and desirable.

Case in 60 seconds

NanoSalad is a genuinely novel plant-based product, and the brand needed to know which packaging, colour and messaging cues would make it feel healthy and desirable rather than confusing.

Traditional research measures what people say, not what they subconsciously feel, so a neuroscience-led read on implicit associations gives a truer signal for a new format.

Condense weeks of nudge ideation into a live one-day workshop, then test the strongest interventions with consumer neuroscience before recommending them.

At Nudgestock 2021, Ogilvy's Big Behavioral Science Creative Workshop gathered 1,000+ ideas and filtered them to a shortlist, and CloudArmy ran implicit and fast-choice tests on colours, packaging and taglines.

The team recommended Verdun Green packaging, the green pack design and the tagline 'The Six-Second Salad', delivered to the brand owner at the close of the event. No in-market performance figures are reported.

Strategy Breakdown

The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.

Consumers meeting an unfamiliar shrunk-vegetable product for the first time and forming fast, largely subconscious judgements about whether it looks healthy.
People say they want healthier, lower-waste food but make snap purchase decisions on cues like colour and wording that they cannot always articulate.
A new-to-world food format has no existing mental shortcuts, so the brand had to build the right associations from scratch through design and language.
NanoSalad positioned itself as an easy, smart way to eat more vegetables and reduce food waste, needing cues that signalled health and credibility.
Colour, package design and phrasing trigger implicit associations that shape perceived healthiness and purchase intent, and these can be measured with reaction-time neuro methods.

Creative & Execution System

Assets & channels

  • Live Nudgestock creative workshop
  • Colour cluster analysis of packaging hues
  • Package-design association testing
  • Implicit evaluative priming of 10 taglines

Partners

  • Ogilvy (Behavioral Science Practice)
  • CloudArmy

Participation mechanic

  • Global audience submitted 1,000+ ideas during the live broadcast, which the team filtered to a shortlist of interventions

Creator role

  • Not disclosed

Why Ogilvy's strategy worked

  1. 1

    Pairing behavioural-science ideation with neuroscience testing gives a faster, evidence-led read on which creative cues a new product should use.

  2. 2

    Measuring implicit associations, rather than stated preferences, is better suited to a novel format where consumers have no existing frame of reference.

  3. 3

    Testing colour, package design and language separately isolated which specific cues drove the healthy, credible associations the brand wanted.

  4. 4

    Running the work live at Nudgestock turned a research process into a demonstration of the agency's method.