A little mystery and the promise of a sweet treat drew Lollapalooza festivalgoers into a nondescript, oversized frozen dessert pint. A minimalist design on the exterior of the black box that included just “The Pint of No Return” messaging and So Delicious Dairy Free’s logo didn’t give a hint of the colorful, multisensory adventure that awaited inside. And it all played into So Delicious’ new campaign, “Dairy Free Your Mind,” about transforming expectations.
“So Delicious is restaging this year, and a big part of that is leaning into the fact that it’s over 35 years old and there are a lot of consumers who don’t know us yet. We kind of knew that the way the brand was showing up was a little bit dated, so we had an opportunity to reenergize and connect with a new generation of consumers at Lollapalooza,” says Virginia Kelly, vp-plant-based foods at Danone North America. “We thought about, how do we make this brand delight every sense you have? Beyond taste, how do we look, smell and even sound amazing?”
The resulting air-conditioned, neon-decorated sensorial world invited attendees to beat the Chicago heat by first stepping into an elevator and “going down” a Delicious Descent to enter the experience. A Scoop Shop distributed samples of four So Delicious frozen dessert flavors, and the Scoopiverse kaleidoscope booth offered festivalgoers a quiz to find their personal flavor profile that was then turned into a downloadable video.
One of the highest trafficked areas was the Chill Out walk-in freezer, set at about 0 degrees Fahrenheit, stocked with pints and mirrored photo ops. On the way out of the activation, branded merch items, such as patches and pens, were available at the Delicious Drip station. A few lucky attendees came away with bigger ticket items like headphones.
“We really tried to put ourselves in the shoes of the fans who were coming to Lollapalooza, where we knew they’d probably be hot, a little bit tired and overstimulated in some ways, needing a pick-me-up,” Kelly says. “We wanted to blow people away when they came in, whether they’re dairy-free or not, and design that space and that experience in a way that would ‘dairy free their minds’ with as many unexpected and delightful experiences as possible.”
No low-key branding here, as “the brand was infused into every single element of the entire experience,” she says, adding that “it was not subtle.” The Pint of No Return became a 3D manifestation of So Delicious’ visual identity and internal brand guide that is used to develop packaging and marketing assets. Sensorial moments included a custom soundtrack created with Made Music Studio to channel “the sound of So Delicious” and scratch-and-sniff wallpaper in the elevator that smelled like one of the brand’s pints.
A Gen Z Content Strategy
With a Gen Z audience in mind, So Delicious worked with a team of nine content creators ahead of and during the festival to drive awareness. The brand’s content team was also on-site, and a sweepstakes where two fans won four-day VIP Lollapalooza tickets, round trip flights and a hotel stay for the weekend drummed up extra excitement on social.
“We definitely had an eye toward what could be evergreen content because anytime you’re putting a lot into a particular marketing activation, it’s great if it can last a bit longer,” Kelly says. “We do recognize that for the Lollapalooza-specific content, that moment has largely passed at this point, but we were able to capture some footage of different moments that happened during the weekend that we can continue to draw from—even things like one of our brand team members had So Delicious-branded nails done by a cool nail artist.”
The line to get into The Pint of No Return held strong throughout the weekend, especially toward the end of the festival, “with a lot of people saying they had heard about it on social and wanted to experience for themselves,” Kelly notes. Almost 14,000 visitors tasted So Delicious products by the end of the run.
“We felt really good that our efforts to get the word out were working, and we saw that about half of our visitors at Lollapalooza were people with no dietary restrictions,” she says. “We had great results: 40 percent were Gen Z, 40 percent had never heard of us before, 89 percent said that they liked the product more after they tasted it, and 60 percent said that they’d look for us in the store after the event, which that’s music to our ears.” Agency: Inspira Marketing.
Photos: Courtesy of So Delicious
