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Building brand value in a category nobody notices

Brief/Problem/Goals

Petco, South Africa's leading Producer Responsibility Organisation, wanted to move the conversation beyond recycling statistics and compliance reporting. The challenge was bigger than simply raising consumer awareness. It was changing belief.

For years, the consumer research commissioned for recycling in general consistently pointed to familiar excuses for not recycling. Excuses such as, "It's too difficult." and "I don't have two bins." often surfaced. Because we were already working with Buy-back Centres, collectors and community associations through the annual Petco Awards, we were able to probe deeper. This revealed a more fundamental truth: people didn't believe recycling actually worked. If their packaging was going to end up in landfill anyway, why should they care?

Our goal was to make South Africa's largely invisible recycling value chain visible. Rather than asking people to recycle, we needed to show them why it matters by revealing the real people, businesses, communities, municipalities and even brands transforming waste into jobs, opportunity and economic value.

Solution

We created a documentary-led storytelling platform that took audiences behind the scenes of South Africa's circular economy.

Travelling the country, we uncovered the collectors, entrepreneurs, recyclers and innovators quietly building a more sustainable future. Instead of producing another corporate sustainability campaign, or a clever 'big idea' to hit consumers, we created authentic human stories that proved recycling works, that it is changing lives, and that we are all a part of this story.

Driven by the success of the platform and audience appetite for more stories, what began as a single documentary series evolved into three seasons: S1 Message in a Bottle; S2 Sorted; and S3 Unpack.

Across the three seasons, the series generated more than 6 million YouTube views with a VTR of 33%. Season Two alone delivered 2.1 million YouTube views, 9.1 million social media impressions, 708,000 completed video views, on the flagship YouTube series. What makes this profound is that it is such a low interest category, consumers aren't watching content about a new car or deciding on their next handbag here. They're choosing to engage with our recycling content.

Most importantly, the work repositioned recycling PET plastic and Liquid Board Packaging (like Tetra Pak) from an abstract environmental issue into a compelling human story, strengthening Petco's leadership in Producer Responsibility while helping South Africans see the circular economy through a completely different lens.

View Season 1

View Season 2

View Season 3

Team Members
  • None Specified
Credits
  • Livio Tronchin
Skillsets
  • None Specified
Technology Used
  • Documentary
  • Social Media
  • Content
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