Loyals as a digital force behind Vascobelo's growth

From coffee supplier to leading lifestyle brand

How do you position yourself as a mature lifestyle brand and conquer the world? Eager to expand but having to cope with a nationwide shortage of hospitality workers due to the COVID crisis? The idea arose to go full steam ahead with digital transformation. Maybe not the first thing that comes to mind, but a very smart one. After all, data is the key to success. Loyals helped lay the foundation for this and the coffee brand took off. Not just the brand, but the company too. A successful digital transformation that depended on fast-moving recruitment campaigns.

70%

Lead Quality

25%

Extra Brand Awareness

4.5+

million online views

About Vascobelo

Vascobelo is a well-established Belgian coffee supplier which has always taken the quality of its 'black gold' very seriously. To stand out and stay ahead of the competition, Vascobelo has in recent years increasingly focused on the culture surrounding coffee. It now also sells wines and tea and, recently, a number of its branches have become successful catering establishments where coffee, tea and wine lovers can have lunch and dinner. It has sky high ambitions for its coffee brand. The company currently has 30 branches and, in the near future, plans to expand to 300 branches worldwide.

A great online challenge

Loyals believes that if you want to build a brand that pays off in various conversions, you first have to have a solid brand identity. In co-creation with Vascobelo, Loyals therefore determined its core values, vision and strategy to achieve this growth. A Customer Experience and User Experience session also helped lay the foundation for a future-proof webshop. Vascobelo already had a strong brand book which served as a direct basis for the look and feel of the online shop and design of the recruitment campaign. Loyals' UX team merely tweaked it so that the brand guidelines translated well into digital.

Growing fast means working hard

Vascobelo grew thanks to its new sleek webshop with a single clear system that serves as a single point of truth and allows customers to easily place large, small and repeat orders. These rapid online and offline developments meant that the company's staff needed to expand as well. Everyone knows that the entire hospitality industry has been facing huge staff shortages since the COVID pandemic. Hiring 50 new employees as quickly as possible was therefore also a challenge and our first challenge, which Loyals was only too happy to sink its teeth into.

Be your finest self

Given the current scarcity of labour, a company's image as an employer brand is more important than ever. In any industry, but especially in the hospitality industry. Your image, profile and culture need to be appealing in order to arouse the interest of potential new employees. If people want to be part of your movement and feel like they belong with you, you'll be one step ahead. Regardless of the employment conditions or salary. The following approach was fundamental to the campaign's success: attracting candidates based on your reason to believe and the brand values. #culturebeatssalary

Vascobelo stands for honesty and positivity. Believing in yourself and motivating others in a fair way are therefore very important company values. Being honourable and sincere. Vascobelo has a strong moral sense and subscribes to family values. It takes the view that time spent with loved ones should always be cherished. Revisit past memories with loved ones and create new ones. Enjoy the Vascobelo lifestyle.

Loyals created the 'Be your finest self' recruitment campaign, which matched Vascobelo's identity: What makes you happy? How do you become the best version of yourself?

Using the four strategy cornerstones Activate, Attention, Match and Apply, Loyals launched a short-term campaign to recruit 50 new employees. It also set up an added recruitment campaign for the long term based on the same cornerstones, moving from traditional communication to an employer branding pay-off. Since Vascobelo's coffee culture was already well established in Belgium, Loyals took its cue from it to reach out to potential staff in other countries.

Loyals created a detailed 'Careers' site and linked it to Recruitee, an AI-driven recruitment platform. This involved Loyals' marketing team, which also provided Vascobelo with technical campaign support. 'Be your finest self' was rolled out with Google Ads, Facebook, LinkedIn and Instagram, and was hugely successful.

Exceptional results

The campaign's lead quality was 70.2%, translating into 40 excellent applicants per month.

In addition, online brand awareness jumped considerably. In the first phase of the campaign, the brand awareness increased by 14%, where in the second phase the brand awareness rise to an impressive 25%.

A result that many hospitality businesses will envy. In fact, the stream of applications became so intense that some branches were unable to keep up. In May, therefore, the campaign was temporarily suspended at the instigation of Vascobelo's HR. This is something we're very proud of.

Two more branches have opened during this campaign and Vascobelo hopes to open even more over the years.

Loyals understands digital transformation and branding

Vascobelo and Loyals are determined to achieve even more successes in the future. Loyals not only understands digital transformation and branding, but is also aware that customers and employees are becoming ever more critical, and everything is in a state of flux. The recruitment campaign not only attracted sufficient numbers of employees but also dramatically boosted brand awareness. Loyals is ready: as soon as Vascobelo starts its growth spurt, Loyals will literally pull out all the stops and get moving. The foundation is in place and it's going to drive the coffee brand for a very long time.