The brand

Since its founding in 2004, KIND has been on a mission to make the world a little kinder one snack and one act at a time. What began as a line of premium Fruit & Nut bars sparked the creation of an entirely new healthier snacking category.
 

The challenge

KIND Snacks came to us in early 2019 looking for a lead strategic agency to tie all of their different marketing growth areas together under their recently developed platform ‘Give KIND a try’. After two very strong years of sales, the brand were hoping to grow even further and become the number-one health bar brand in the UK. To date, the brand had seen success through well-timed bursts of activity including sampling and activation, but in order to meet their ambitious targets they needed an agency that could bring unity to their new positioning and devise a cohesive plan for the coming year. The successful agency would need to be versatile, connecting lots of different channels both on and offline together with ease. 

As an organisation, KIND is committed to ‘inspiring and celebrating kindness’, ultimately making the world a kinder place. Any agency that the brand partnered with would need to demonstrate that they too were purpose-driven, placing social responsibility at the heart of their business.
 

The Creativebrief process

The stakeholders involved in this process were based in both the UK and the US, so Creativebrief’s unique insight into the UK marketing landscape was invaluable to the client. Especially as this was KIND’s first lead strategic agency in the UK.

The clients didn’t have a specific type or size of agency in mind when they briefed us, so we kept the shortlist quite broad. Making sure that the agencies had experience in purpose-driven brands, FMCG and high growth companies. The final shortlist was a real mix of agencies and the client later fed back that they felt they had seen the best of what the UK market was able to offer them. 

Right from the offset we identified with the KIND client that they didn’t want to run a ‘traditional’ pitch process. Instead of seeing polished creative executions at the final pitch stage they would be asking a strategic business question that the agencies needed to answer. We decided to run a fairly rigid process ruling out a specific number of agencies at each stage, which allowed agencies to demonstrate exactly what the client needed to see at each stage. The final pitch consisted of half-day workshops in which the client and agency picked apart strategic questions together. There was also some time to socialise and get to know each other better following the meeting.
 

The result

Off the back of a competitive process, Intermarketing was appointed. They showed a real passion for the brand throughout the process and set a high bar for creativity with the Adidas work they showed early on in the pitch process. After appointing Intermarketing, the client couldn’t wait to start fleshing out ideas from the pitch with them. The alternative process allowed the team at KIND snacks to get more of a feel for what it would be like to
work alongside one another, collaborating and arriving at strategic thoughts together rather than having that ta-da moment once all the thinking had been done by the agency.
 

To find out more how Creativebrief better connects brands and agencies, please get in touch today on +44 (0)20 7478 8200 or email [email protected]