Belgium’s leading coffee brand Douwe Egberts has won a Golden Effie Award with its ‘breakfast’ campaign, created by Duval Guillaume. The campaign succeeded in raising sales volume and market share, in reaching unseen likeability scores and in attracting new young consumers for the category.

Breakfast and morning use are key moments for coffee use. But the share of coffee in the morning had been declining for years. With the so called ‘Foccee’ campaign (dyslectic version of ‘coffee’), Douwe Egberts managed to turn this trend around. Each of the campaign waves had a significant effect both on sales (average +12%) and on share of stomach.

This year, Douwe Egberts has already been awarded at the CCB, and has been elected as Advertiser of the Year. The campaign has also been listed as Most Likeable campaign by both flemish as french speaking radio audiences.

Lotus is the Belgian reference brand in biscuits and baked goods. With last year’s launch campaign for their new product gingerbread, Lotus succeeded to give the brand a new lease of life and at the same time claim leadership in this new category. The campaign took home a Bronze trophee at this year’s Effie Awards.

Gingerbread used to be a rather stuffy category with an ageing user base and was not attracting new consumers anymore. It was key to teach young Belgian consumers to eat gingerbread again. The point of departure was to position gingerbread as a good energy provider, containing sugar, but no fats.

The “energy” proposition came to life in a TV commercial of which the soundtrack became a real earwurm. Annoying to some, it definitely had a strong impact on many. The brand awareness reached new heights and the campaign managed to raise sales both for the new product and for the whole brand.

Duval Guillaume and Lotus are glad to already win an Effie with their very first campaign in their very first year of collaboration. The Belgian evergreen cookie brand is glad to be back and as the latest growth updates show, this is only the beginning.

The Belgian Effie Awards, organized by ACC, UBA and the Marketing Foundation, honour campaigns that achieve real results. This year, two of our clients’ campaigns are nominated: Lotus gingerbread and Douwe Egberts breakfast.

All 7 nominees actually win an Effie Award. That means the nominees are already certain of Bronze. But we’ll have to wait until the Effie gala on the 10^th of June to know whether the Bronze turns into Silver or Gold.