How Avocados Took Over the World & How I Led the Revolution

Just a few years ago it would have been impossible to predict the meteoric rise to fame of the (not so) humble avocado. Honoured with over six million, eighty-four thousand Instagram hashtags, perpetrator of ‘avocado hand’ injuries bemoaned by London surgeons and even blamed for the failure of the Millennial generation to get a foot on the housing ladder, avocados are the media-hungry bad boys of the fruit world. I take pride in the part I played in launching both these little green rebels and, by design, the client I aligned them with, further into the spotlight.

Last year I came up with the idea of gently persuading the avocado out of it’s comfort zone as the toast topping de jour, to the previously unconquered territory of the restaurant menu from starter to desert.

With sold out dates throughout April, May and June, avocado lovers tucked into an avo-only menu featuring avocado soup, risotto, cocktails, ice cream and chocolate at our five-course pop-up brunch event in Shoreditch. Orchestrated by my team at Meredith Collective as part of an on-going collaboration with Whirlpool, juxtaposing the brand with innovative food and promoting the concept of #whirlpoolfoodies, the pop-up was a resounding success…and the avo-lution of the avocado had begun.

Since the boundaries were pushed, there’s been no holds barred on the continued escalation of the avo-trend with permanent restaurants running with the idea of an avocado-dominant menu including the launch of Avocaderia in New York and The Avocado Show in Amsterdam. Several of the social-media savvy techniques we used in our own Avo Pop-up have been replicated in other places serving the trendy fruit.

So how did it happen? How did we move the avocado from a colourful alternative to butter, to a worldwide restaurant favourite?  And – perhaps more pertinently - why?

When brands approach me to work together, they are generally looking for two key things: 1) to introduce their products to a previously uninterested market segment and 2) to mark themselves out as culturally-relevant and on-trend, particularly if they have previously been perceived as a less than dynamic brand. Successful brands need to operate within their audience’s cultural context, in other words the ‘world’ they live in, and those that don’t risk being overlooked or overshadowed by competitors.

We know that brand perception is a mental creation, constructed from everything a potential customer has seen, heard, read or experienced in relation to a brand, so by taking control of some of those perceptions by creating brand alignment with an already established trend like avocados, generating media exposure off the back of this in target consumer publications and instigating positive direct consumer interaction through something as fun as a brunch pop-up, the brand enters a new consumer’s field of awareness.

Knowing which concepts to put your name behind in a world of fickle trends and gone-tomorrow fads, however, is a difficult judgement to make without a proven track record or experience and is the reason why clients choose to work with me.

Knowing When to Ride the Wave

Reading waves and knowing how they will bend and break is one of the most important skills in surfing - and in the experiential marketing industry. The point at which you want to catch the wave is when it is steep enough to push you along, but not when it’s moments away from breaking.

Likewise, our commercial successes are a calculated judgement of when an idea or trend has risen far enough to garner widespread attention (for both the idea and the brand I align it with) but hasn’t passed its peak and become passé (thereby potentially damaging brand reputation).

In the case of avocados, their wave began back in 1999 when Nigel Slater suggested avocado on toast in his Guardian newspaper column. Their popularity grew in 2013 when Gwyneth Paltrow declared them “reliable, easy and always just what you want”. Before long, no self-respecting Millennial bruncher would be seen without at least one avocado picture on their Insta-feed and by 2016 when we started to plan the Avo Pop Up, the trend had spread far enough for several market segments to be keen avocado fans, but without having reached saturation.

This meant that our event was launched at a time when the fruit was already being discussed and celebrated by our target audience and, by adding the unique element of a full-menu restaurant, it added an innovative twist on an idea that had already taken hold.

For our client, Whirlpool, this gave them the opportunity to be aligned with a relevant trend and capitalise on the media coverage and social media scope that accompanies an idea everybody is talking about. It also elevated their brand reputation as a company with their finger on the pulse, culturally-aware and in tune with their target market.

Laying the Groundwork for Viral Coverage

Identifying and aligning with a breaking trend - in this instance, avocados - was only half the battle. We needed to make sure that people not only enjoyed the event, but also discussed it before, during and after.

While you can’t control what people want to talk about on social media, there are things you can do to increase the chances – and good commercial reasons for doing so. Consuming user generated content accounts for 5.4 hours of an average Millennial’s (age 18-36) day – that means that around 30% of their total daily media consumption is coming directly from their peers. Information gathered through UGC (user-generated content) is trusted 40% more than information from other media and is 30% more memorable than other sources.

What that means for brands is that they need an idea to capture the imagination of their audiences, for them to then shape their peer’s perceptions through UGC.

What that means for experiential marketing is that the events we create need to make people feel compelled to talk about it and with that comes the necessity of knowing what excites, amuses or moves consumers - and what they will want to photograph.

It’s no co-incidence that the latest New York avocado restaurant launched their Instagram account six months before they even opened their doors. In an Instagram-hungry world, a product or experience that translates well visually is absolutely key.

For our Avo pop-up, we took that idea one step further and made sure restaurant goers had plenty to photograph from visually stunning food, to avocado cushions, photo props, colour matched crockery and a ready-made hashtag to link it all together. At other events we’ve handed out gin toothpaste from a bath tub, converted washing machines into cocktail makers, branded fresh coconuts and even featured live reindeer and  life-size stuffed bears to ensure our audience publish photographs of their experience.

For every event, you need to lay the groundwork to make it easy for people to talk about and share their experience with their peers. We offered hashtags on handheld foam boards for social media interaction (with space for selfie-loving consumers to put their face), hashtags on placemats (specifically designed to include ‘fun facts’ and other talking points) and on Grow Your Own Avocado kits which each customer took home.

Thinking strategically about the ‘digital shadow’ of your event – i.e. how you can encourage people to continue talking about it after the event itself is over – is often overlooked by those that lack experience in this arena but can be key for a commercially sound campaign. Something as simple as an avocado kit to grow at home keeps the event fresh in the consumers’ mind (and potentially, the awareness of their peers if they choose to post updates).

To play our part in the avocado revolution, we made sure we laid the groundwork for our event long before, and after, the pop-up itself to make it easy for peer to peer sharing on all-important social media.  We achieved over 100 brand media mentions across the UK’s leading consumer and trade media including Time Out (circulation 308,995 in print and 10,245,671 online), the Evening Standard (circulation 902,005 in print, 9,966,911 online) and The Telegraph online (84,798,456). We were brought to 1.2 million listeners on BBC Radio 4 and we still receive press requests more than a year after the event.

I’m proud of the part we played in continuing the trend of avocados and the success that we achieved for our client in connecting them in their consumers’ mind as an on-trend, innovative brand.

As for the avocados themselves, who knows where they’ll pop up next? Will there be more full-time restaurants embracing the idea of an all avocado menu? Will they maintain their coveted place in the ‘Top Instagram Hashtags’ lists? Will another Brand Strategist pick up the baton and move them one step further on their avo-lution than I did?

The avocado love-in is far from over and I’m certain we haven’t seen the last of these little green rebels just yet. I’m happy to have played my part.

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