CASE STUDY
BRAND & CULTURAL PARTNERSHIPS
Designing a repeatable event activation model for a $650M food group.
Replaced a cycle of resource-intensive, one-off activations with a single repeatable commercial and partnership model — reducing production friction while extending brand, chef, and media partnerships across future campaigns.
Client: A diversified FMCG group with a portfolio of household food brands sold globally.
Engagement: Fixed-term Project
Service: Repeatable Event Sponsorship Activation Model Design
Region: Perth, Australia
Date of Completion: July 2024
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2 major food brands showcased
including one new product launch.
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Multichannel reach to 30,000 live attendees
across live experience, onsite media, as well as additional social amplification and post-content reuse.
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One repeatable activation model
Redeployed across two further major events that same year, and again for the next year’s season of key marketing events.
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Chef and talent partnerships established
extending brand credibility beyond the event.
Event sponsorships and brand activations can be powerful marketing tools, but can also be resource-intensive. Without a reusable model, each one demands fresh planning, budget, and staff time from the ground up. The challenge is building something robust enough to reuse, not reinvent, every time.
THE OPPORTUNITY
To transform brand activations from resource-intensive, one-off exercises into a repeatable commercial and operational asset.
The group holds a portfolio of well-known food brands, each with strong retail presence but competing for attention in a crowded FMCG landscape. Their events calendar included regular participation in major food festivals, trade shows, and public events, but each activation was resourced and planned independently. This placed a recurring strain on the internal marketing team’s time and budget.
The opportunity was not simply to deliver a strong presence at one event, but to design a model that could be built once and applied repeatedly across their marketing events calendar. Thereby, reducing the burden on internal teams while maintaining consistency and quality each time.
CONTEXT OF BUSINESS & CONDITIONS
Diversified food and agribusiness with $650M AUD annual turnover and 1,400 employees across Australia.
Portfolio of household food brands distributed nationally and internationally.
One central marketing team operating across multiple brands with shared budgets and timelines.
Participation in major food festivals and tradeshows is a significant approach within the broader marketing strategy, creating high consumer, media, and trade visibility.
There was a need to justify experiential investment beyond awareness in a crowded FMCG category.
A repeatable brand activation model delivers strong returns because it streamlines absolutely everything that does not need to be done repeatedly. It buys back space for internal teams to then focus their energy on what will truly elevate each activation: concept and delivery.
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Before intervention
Each activation was planned and resourced from scratch, requiring significant standalone budget, staff time, and coordination.
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After intervention
A single, reusable brand activation model gave the team a ready-made framework — outlining format, staffing, concept considerations, and the like — that could be redeployed across future events with a fraction of the original effort.
THE INTERVENTION
Rather than design a single activation, we structured a three-part brand activation model, built explicitly to be reused across the group’s calendar of major events, and interchangeably across their portfolio of consumer food brands. For their purposes, given their industry and positioning, this included:
A flagship, revenue-generating pop-up was designed as the reusable anchor format, located in a high-traffic, prime area of the festival to maximise visibility and footfall. Working with the group’s partnering brand agency, the space was designed to be visually distinctive and highly shareable, while I consulted with hospitality specialists to ensure it was fully staffed, food-safe, and POS-ready. The pop-up sold onsite both food-for-consumption (via a custom designed menu of lunch options) and take-home perishable food products, converting brand engagement into direct commercial return.
Selected chef-talent personalities showcased the group’s brand products live onstage, demonstrating recipes which featured key products. These live demonstrations included tastings for audiences and generated high-quality recipe content and footage that the group’s marketing team could then reappropriate for future campaigns and marketing activities, extending value well beyond the festival.
Product placement was integrated throughout the wider festival ecosystem, including VIP menus, media placements, and on-screen brand integrations across precincts. This ensured a strong brand presence across various touchpoint of the festival, not just at the flagship popup.
Together, these elements created a holistic event sponsorship activation model that could be picked up and redeployed across several events a year, over many years. This first engagement served as the pilot which produced the rigorous systems (captured as key document templates) that would empower the internal marketing team to streamline and leverage their efforts moving forward.
THE IMPACT
A repeatable event sponsorship activation model established, replacing one-off activations with a scalable model redeployed across future campaigns with far less production effort each time.
Proven repeatable in practice, not just theory. The model was redeployed for two subsequent events that year, and again for repeating events the following year.
Significantly reduced resourcing burden on the internal marketing team, who no longer needed to design an activation format from scratch for each event.
Direct revenue generated onsite through food and retail sales, demonstrating the model could function as a commercial channel, not just a brand-awareness exercise.
Reusable content assets created at scale, with chef-talent-led demonstrations generating recipe IP, video, and brand content redeployed across digital and social channels.
A durable, repeatable model introduced for a multi-brand portfolio, allowing individual brands within the group to plug into a proven model while maintaining consistency and strategic coherence across events.
If the problem is still taking shape,
that’s a good time to talk.
Partnerships, brand strategy, and place-based projects rarely take a clear shape from the outset. If yours feels more tangled than it first appeared, let’s work it through together.