Thank you for the food

Do you know what the profession of a nutritionist entails? No? You are not alone. For a long time, Umeå University had difficulties filling up the slots for the Nutritional Science Program, and to solve this they decided to turn the degree into a remote program. However, they still needed help attracting applicants from all over Sweden to fill the program’s 20 slots. What we realized was that the profession as such is fairly unknown, and that few people know what a nutritionist actually does. So how can we get people to apply for a degree that no one knows about? Simply by saying, thank you.

By placing the end consumer, rather than the professionals, in the spotlight, we were able to attach a higher purpose to the profession. By doing this, we made it clear that working in the industry is not primarily about food. It is about people. Regardless of whether you work as a food inspector at a private company, or as a nutritionist in elderly care, the food will eventually end up on someone's plate, right? And if the nutritionist has done his/her job well, we can rest assured that the food on our plates is healthy and nutritious, and has a positive impact on public health.

To express this, our solution shows ordinary people, in ordinary environments, instead of portraying food. This sent a clear message that as a nutritionist, one cares about human beings, and for that, we are grateful. The concept became a guide for all creative outlets in social media and on the website, where text and imagery was customized based on the target group, creating a distinction between the different platforms.

The campaign attracted 534 applications, of which 187 were first-time applicants, to the 20 available program slots. Compared to the previous years, during which the program had a hard time filling up the slots, this was a significant difference.

The total reach was 1,182,578 to 198,931 unique impressions, where the content generated a high level of commitment in terms of a relatively low media budget.

These are the results of us producing relevant content exposed to relevant target groups.