HelloFresh on Building the Brand’s In-House Creative Powerhouse

Doug> Our creative team works with all of the brands under the HelloFresh Group umbrella and is designed to be agile in producing original content and assets that fully align with our brand marketing goals. We are a group of multifaceted professionals from over 15 countries, including strategists, project managers, designers, digital marketers, producers, copywriters, and editors. Our team belongs to the international marketing department, led by our SVP, Patrick Stal, and our structure allows for swift collaboration with the rest of the teams in the department.

The decision to keep our creative work in-house stems from the need for greater efficiency while ensuring a unified but locally-relevant representation of our brands. As a global business, it’s important to maintain consistency when we communicate as a brand. We have a shared vision throughout the team and it allows us to maintain a homogeneous look and feel across our markets. Naturally, every country has its own nuances and unique culture, but our offering and value proposition are indeed global in scope.

Our ‘Back to School’ campaign represents a new era for our creative work at HelloFresh. We know that every family is different and has their own needs when it comes to weeknight dinner time, so we decided to hero the uniqueness of our offering through the lens of visually-unique families. We love this look as it brings a dash of fresh energy and renewed excitement to the HelloFresh story.

We believe that we have one of the most exciting products in the market and truly believe in our ability to bring fun and enjoyment to every family. Our creative work should strive to accomplish exactly the same.

Doug> The decision to bring the ‘Back to School’ campaign to life through our in-house team was driven by the need to work quickly while collaborating with various internal teams and maintaining our brand consistency. As a brand present in 18 markets, our creative input must tie in well with the ambitions and objectives of our global and local teams, while catering to the needs of our consumers all around the world. By owning the creative in-house we maintain full supervision of the creative process from ideation to implementation, maintaining complete alignment with our messaging and brand values.

Partnering with external agencies certainly has its benefits, such as minimising the impact on our team capacities. However, managing the campaign internally indeed allows us to stick to our evolving marketing goals and keep up the pace in our creative output, which often requires agile turnarounds. It’s not just about cost efficiency. We have a group of very skilled professionals at HelloFresh who deeply understand our brands and work together to achieve a common goal.

Doug> One of the biggest advantages of having an in-house creative team is the opportunity to produce a creative route that is aligned with our consumer needs. At HelloFresh, we are in regular contact with our consumers, so we can understand our audience's needs at a deeper level. This data-driven approach allows us to create personalised campaigns that resonate with our consumer needs and facilitate the constant decisions that our consumers make in their daily routines. In-house means we can activate these insights to ensure that every piece of creative is made with our consumers and what they value most at the front of it.

Another significant benefit is that we own the creative decision-making to adapt it to our current needs. In the case of the ‘Back to School’ campaign, we kept our brand creatives at the heart of culture, creating a strong connection with a contemporary theme that ensured our brand remained authentic and relevant. Another example is the introduction of the new ‘Hello Dinner, HelloFresh’ tagline, which represents a bold update to our brand’s visual identity. We are so fortunate to have our customers welcome us into their homes each and every week and we are so happy to be a part of their lives. The idea of saying “Hello” is a nod to the relationship we have with our customers now and in the future. This has only been possible by having a streamlined decision-making process in our in-house creative team.

Doug> Like any creative team, we want to work with the very best in the business. To do this, we put a heavy emphasis on finding suitable potential creative and production partners.

For this project, once we designed the concept, we met with a group of production agencies and shortlisted our preferred option. While reviewing the directors’ treatments, we found Dan’s work to be the most aligned with the look and feel that we were seeking. We are very happy with the collaboration between our team, Dan and LeBerg.

Doug> While we handle most of our creative work in-house at HelloFresh, we also recognise the value of bringing an external partner to our projects. They bring fresh perspectives outside the tunnel vision that brands sometimes face by being used to a certain way of working. Additionally, agencies often come with specialised skills or expertise that complement well our internal team, such as highly technical production required while engaging with emerging trends.

In general, external partners provide valuable insights as they work with clients across different industries. Their perspective on other brands allows us to stay ahead of the current trends in the ever-evolving marketing communications landscape. Combining their external expertise with our internal consumer insights helps us to produce campaigns that are both innovative and highly relevant for our consumers.

Doug> One of the main challenges we face is to constantly move away from our comfort zone. When you work non-stop on the same brands you develop some familiar patterns in the way you work, and begin creating rules that may or may not make sense or need to be honoured. Like any agency, we challenge ourselves to keep the work fresh (pun intended) in regards to preferred designs, creative approaches, etc. We achieve this by staying in touch with ‘what’s out there’ and continuing to push ourselves to innovate, trying and experimenting with new ideas all the time.

Another challenge is to balance the scale of the demand for creative assets while ensuring our in-house team has the capacity to produce work that is up to our creative standards. As all the creative assets are produced internally, there is always the pressure of delivering the materials fast without compromising on quality.

In regards to the opportunities, our setup allows for seamless cross-functional collaboration, leveraging different professional backgrounds, insights, and expertise, helping us to create campaigns that feel and sound more cohesive and aligned than traditional models might.

At HelloFresh we always put consumers at the heart of everything we do. We all understand our brand in the same way, as well as the role that it plays in our consumer lives. Working internally grants us the opportunity to take calculated risks in our creative territories, but also pivot quickly if needed. Everyone in our team works together toward the same goal: to change the way people eat forever.

Doug> My advice to every external partner would be to dedicate their initial efforts to really understand the brand goals as well as what it means for the consumers. We value when our agencies truly become an extension of our teams, not just a supplier of services. In the case of HelloFresh, I’d encourage them to get involved in our strategy, learn our various insights, and work together with us on a deeper level that ensures the long-term success of our brand.

I would also add, building a relationship that is set with clear goals in mind, as well as helping us manage our expectations as the client. We live the HelloFresh brand and work hard to make it thrive and that comes with great expectations. Transparency and honesty in our collaboration are crucial to ensure a smooth and effective creative process – we, as a client, are also grateful to be challenged in our assumptions.

Doug> Bringing new people to the team is always exciting. We are lucky to have some of the most creative individuals in Berlin, and we always strive to maintain this sort of excellence when we look for new talent.

We recognise that there is an increasing interest from creatives who want to work in-house. It allows them to have a more immediate impact on the brand by seeing how their work comes to life across different channels and markets. However, we also recognise the challenges of attracting talent. There is fierce competition and we’re always looking for the right fit to our team.

Ultimately, our brand is the best representative to bring new talent to our team. People want to work for a brand that is making an impact and is also at the forefront of creativity. Therefore, the work we do for our brands has important ramifications in multiple aspects, not only on sales, allowing us to attract highly talented individuals who are as passionate as we are about HelloFresh.

Doug> For us, it is crucial to stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new technologies and trends and we actively test new ideas with every campaign. For example, in our recent ‘Back to School’ campaign, we were able to develop a hyperbolic and highly visual approach to engage consumers across multiple channels. The campaign leveraged AI to this end, allowing us to personalise content in our digital channels to connect with our consumers in more innovative and engaging ways.

We also strive to identify emerging trends and potential shifts in behaviours in the markets where we operate. This allows us to design and implement integrated campaigns that are truly relevant for our consumers and not just quickly forgotten. As mentioned before, we live the HelloFresh brand and everyone in our team works very hard to make it thrive.