• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, January 6, 2016

To drive awareness and sampling of its newly "clean" soups — particularly its broccoli cheddar flavor — Panera Bread is offering fans the opportunity to have their tweets about the soup incorporated in an "endless trailer" video.

The video trailer, from Anomaly, dramatizes the extraordinary lengths that Panera's head chef Dan Kish went to in order to remove artificial colors, flavors, sweeteners and preservatives from the soup without affecting the flavor that has made it the chain's best seller. (To remove eight ingredients, Kish went through 60 variations of the soup, according to Panera.) 

Mimicking the style of a movie trailer, the video shows footage of Kish recreating his arduous reformulation process, interspersed with titles like "A chef obsessed" and "To make history...he remade everything." 

The full 60-second version was posted on January 6 on a campaign site, panerasoupreview, in tandem with Panera's announcement that it has become the first national restaurant chain to offer a "clean" soup menu. In addition, a 30-second teaser version is now posted on Panera's social channels, including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube (also see that version below).

Between now and March 31, the brand's fans are being encouraged to view the trailer and tweet on panerasoupreview, using #SoupReview for a chance to have their comments or reviews added to the trailer. The tweets, which will appear in the in-quotations style used for movie reviews, will be interspersed amid extended footage, so that each tweet in effect unlocks a few more seconds of new film. 

In addition to engaging followers — who will get to see their tweets immortalized in the video — the idea is to create a trailer that is longer, more interesting and more shareable as users tweet at it, Panera's head of marketing, Chris Hollander, tells Marketing Daily.

"This is the first time that we've announced major menu news through social media," says Hollander. And the trailer is likely to become epic indeed: The brand intends to add most of the #SoupReview  tweets generated during the three-month campaign period, he reports.

Panera has been teasing the clean-menu announcement since Dec. 28, with screen grabs and brief excerpts from the video, along with messages such as "Something big is coming...And it changes everything. #ComingSoon."

It has also been doing a lot of social media outreach to fans — including extending offers for a free serving of the new, clean soups to select consumers whose posts have identified them as particularly passionate lovers of Panera's soups, says Hollander. 

The mostly organic campaign is using some Facebook promoted posts, video link ads and promoted tweets as support. Weber Shandwick is handling PR for the campaign.

Panera sells 200 million servings of soup a year, rotating daily between 10 core soups in addition to seasonal favorites such as turkey chili. Soup accounts for about 25% of its total annual sales, or about $672 million, according to The Street, and broccoli cheddar accounts for a third of the business, or some 66 million servings.

The unveiling of the clean soup menu is another important step toward Panera's fulfilling its promise to eliminate the 150-plus ingredients on its self-created "No No List" from its entire menu by the end of 2016.

That promise was announced in 2014 and has been promoted through its multimedia "Food As It Should Be" campaign since last June. The company says it's on track to meet that goal. In fact, with the clean soup menu now in place, it's about 85% to 90% of the way there, according to Hollander.