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DRIVE Series
Wed
29
Jan 2025
Our Brand Partnerships Manager, Matthew Delooze recently caught up with Katie Rosen, Head of Creative at Gousto to discuss the brand’s unique creative approach in a growing FMCG category.
Founded in 2012, Gousto is a recipe box that inspires every home cook to be more adventurous at dinnertime. With over 500 recipes to discover on the menu every month, Gousto sends precise ingredients and easy-to-follow recipe cards, making whipping up impressive meals at home simple and fun. So that everyone can feel empowered to cook and enjoy delicious mouth-watering, home-cooked meals.
This conversation delves into Gousto's unique creative approach to stay ahead in the recipe box space. Highlighting how the brand enables its teams to thrive in an ever-changing and growing market, utilising omni-channel campaigns to drive audience growth and loyalty.
From the use of emotional connections to engage audiences, to the value of collaboration between in-house teams and external support – join us as Katie shares insights into creative leadership, including her success in adapting Gousto’s brand strategy and launch of ‘Steal the Show’ campaign.
Katie: I’ve been working in in-house creative teams for over 20 years now, having led creative across ‘food, fossils, and football’, as my experience includes roles at Innocent, Natural History Museum, and the Football Association (FA).
In my various roles, I've been lucky enough to work on a huge range of platforms, from packaging, print, to digital, social media, radio and TV. There are three things I always look for in a role: the ability to develop the team, to help elevate creativity to drive business impact and a business that aligns with my own values to serve the community or make the world that little bit better.
I've been with Gousto for almost five years now, having started during the pandemic. It was an unusual time to start a new job, but Gousto was thriving, with a product that was in high demand, so it was a fantastic opportunity to get stuck in and support that growth.
Katie: Day one was all about finding a new creative agency partner. After an interesting and insightful pitch process conducted entirely via Zoom during the height of Covid, we chose to award the account to Mother, an agency I had previously worked with at Innocent.
Within six months we’d collaborated to deliver a new campaign that shifted the brand's messaging from a functional explanation of what a recipe box is and its benefits to a more emotional narrative, highlighting how cooking with Gousto makes people feel.
Alongside this, I focused on expanding and developing the creative team. When I joined, the team consisted of only eight members across copy, operations, photography, and design.
We needed to grow quickly. With the team growth, we overhauled our ways of working, improving our collaboration with internal teams, simplifying processes for them to better understand how to get the best out of creative teams. This allowed us to work together more seamlessly and achieve great results.
One of my top priorities was making the Gousto box an exciting experience for customers. Everyone who opens it and starts unpacking should feel genuine excitement and anticipation. I was given the challenge of exploring how we use this interaction to boost customer satisfaction and brand loyalty.
Some of the exciting things we did to achieve this included elevating the packaging, gifting, sampling and instant prizes – most recently launching a Golden Ticket campaign which gave loyal customers the chance to win prizes including holidays, a year of cinema tickets or free Gousto boxes.
In a nutshell, I'm responsible for the overall brand experience and lead a wonderfully independent creative team that's grown to over 20 people. I work closely with senior leaders in the business so that we can bring creative ideas in earlier and be involved strategically, helping customers engage with the brand in the best way possible.
Katie: I could give you a million answers, but if I had to sum it up, I’d say that absolutely everyone in the business is focused on our vision to be the UK's most loved way to eat dinner – so there is a continued and positively relentless drive to elevate the proposition and how we communicate it. We don't shy away from exploring new ways to meet customers, like a tunnel takeover at Kings Cross, or on-shelf in Sainsbury’s.
Katie: Like a lot of companies, Gousto grew massively during the pandemic but had to adjust as people got back to normal.
We made sure we tailored our offering to a wider audience, giving more consideration to the choice of cuisines available, box sizes and dietary requirements so that more people could see that Gousto was right for them. It was important to understand what our customers needed from us and then communicate the proposition in a way that worked for them.
We’ve also looked at different ways we could show up to customers and be relevant for people who want a 'cook it yourself' solution at the last minute or to try Gousto without the subscription. So we partnered with Sainsbury's to launch Gousto in supermarkets – giving us a whole new marketing channel and visibility in stores. It was incredibly exciting to develop Gousto boxes to stand out on shelf amongst a different type of competition.
Take a look at our calendar of free virtual strategy workshops, designed to tackle the key challenges facing in-house marketing leaders.
Katie: Creative plays a key role in tackling retention in the subscription space, by constantly driving customer engagement and loyalty through interesting comms that explain our varied menu and ever evolving proposition and personalised experiences.
At Gousto, we collaborate really closely with the retention team to develop targeted campaigns, often based on our menu campaigns such as South East Asia and Thrive 25, that emotionally connect with customers and reinforce the value of choosing Gousto.
We invest a lot of thought into these initiatives, creating social videos and CRM campaigns that celebrate the emotional bond people have with food, aligning it with the Gousto brand to drive excitement and encourage retention.
Katie: Our 'Steal the Show' campaign launched in December 2022 and was based on the insight that it’s been a long time since dinner’s been the focal point of our evenings, and that mostly all we end up doing is watching a Netflix show with a bowl of whatever.
With the campaign we want to show that cooking with Gousto changes that – with our unrivalled selection of incredibly-delicious, easy to cook meals – we give dinner its rightful place back, as the evening’s headline attraction. The beauty of this concept lies in its versatility, serving as the cornerstone of our creative and strategic activities for over two years.
For instance, during the cost of living crisis, we reinforced Gousto’s value proposition with a spot titled 'Dinner with the Don', featuring a Tony Soprano-inspired character who presented Gousto as an offer you couldn’t refuse.
Additionally, we've adapted the concept into a series of 'movie trailer' spots that cater to our diverse audience personas. With six more months of 'Steal the Show' remaining, we're excited to see how much further we can stretch it to answer the briefs in the first half this year.
Katie: We always want to see work that is inspiring, shows a different way of thinking about a problem, and pushes us. The questions I ask when reviewing work are: is the idea creatively interesting? Does it solve the business challenge? Does it meet our quality standards? And you have to keep the budget in mind, of course.
It's also really important that we can work well together and learn from each other. I'm a firm believer in true partnership between agencies and in-house creative teams, which means both teams are open to collaborating throughout the entire process – from strategy, scripting to the shoot, and even down to things like wardrobe tweaks and VO’s. Not all agencies embrace this kind of partnership but it's vital to success.
And finally, it's important that the brief is single-minded and clear, and that the agency fully understands it – especially if the aim is to stand out from competitors. We have to differentiate ourselves and create unique and compelling messaging, otherwise we'll easily get mixed up with other brands.
Katie: The most exciting thing for me is seeing the creative ideas presented and getting that gut feel for where that idea could take the business, if it matches (and elevates!) our brand, and would resonate with customers.
Navigating pitch processes can be challenging, and there are certain elements that are more difficult. For example, it doesn't always seem fair to evaluate an agency's success when they're just beginning to understand our business and are expected to deliver a solution without the depth of knowledge needed.
Another challenging aspect is the uncertainty of whether the people you meet during the pitch will be your contacts post-pitch. This can lead to recurring issues and the potential lack of chemistry with the team ultimately assigned to your account. The ability to work together effectively is fundamental to the success of the partnership, and to making great work.
Katie: To have a more diverse creative industry, for sure. It's been a huge driver since I started leading creative teams. My job is to make great creative for brands and to build a team that can deliver that. The only way you can truly do this is to have people who think differently working together, people from all different backgrounds challenging each other, building on each other's ideas and bringing in new perspectives and ways of thinking. You just get better ideas and become better people for it.
Find the right agency partner for your 2025 strategy with The GO! Network. As a free-to-use marketing intermediary, we run tailored searches specific to your criteria and budget for a longer, more prosperous agency relationship - Get in Touch to get started.
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