CLIF Bar
CLIF Bar, and its subsidiary product lines have been an established leader in the performance and snack bar category for years. As an independently-owned company, they’re driven by a set of aspirations to use business growth to become model corporate citizens. At Bukwild, I’ve had the opportunity to partner with CLIF’s internal digital team on a number of initiatives since 2013. Below are a few recent projects I’ve worked on for the brand:
clifbar.com
In 2019 we began planning to re-design and re-platform CLIF Bar’s website. The primary objective was to merge the web store, which had historically been run through a whitelisted third-party retailer, onto a fully owned website managed and fulfilled by CLIF Bar.
Over a period of five months, I lead the Bukwild design team and CLIF stakeholders through a number of workshops and design sessions to roadmap, architect, and plan the customer experience for the new site, basing decisions on historical user data and business requirements.
Notably, the pandemic struck halfway through the design phase of the project, and we were able to transition nearly seamlessly to remote work sessions, without any effect on the project timetable.
A newly-designed, re-platformed site launched in August of 2020. By creating a more seamless integration between the e-commerce and content marketing elements of the site, there’s already been an increase in both engagement and revenue. More importantly, the CLIF digital team has a more powerful set of tools to enable them to deliver a meaningful end-to-end customer experience for their consumers.
Annual Planning
I’ve led the CLIF Bar digital team through a number of workshops to help identify their department goals as they relate to the business objectives at-large. This series of exercises helps to align the entire team on their strategic drivers, and identify marketing tactics that can be used to address them. Tactics are mapped to an impact/effort matrix, and finally, the core leadership team works together to build an annual plan based on the output of each workshop.
Sustained Energy Campaign
I’ve worked with the CLIF brand teams on a number of campaigns – most recently, Sustained Energy. As CLIF Bar’s flagship product has come under direct fire from competitors over the amount of sugar contained, they needed a communications plan to explain the purpose of CLIF Bar’s ingredients. I developed a strategy to surface the extensive work that the company’s nutritionists had done, explaining how every ingredient supports athletic performance. The creative repackaged and elevated this content into a series of ads that focused on athletes, and drove back to a campaign hub with guides to help customers understand the use cases for CLIF Bar’s products.
