Lately, I’ve been on a health kick. No, not in my personal life. I’ve been putting a lot of time into work, especially with travel, and have fallen off the workout routine. I mean a “health kick” in terms of this blog. Friday was Tylenol, last Wednesday was Align, and today I want to cover the Metamucil 30-Day Difference program for a heart-healthy lifestyle. Hey – maybe this can kick-start my workout habit as well.

Enough about me; let’s talk about Metamucil and fiber. Yeah, I write it proudly. Wait… you’re probably thinking about Metamucil as just a laxative and trying to figure out some way that I’m going to make a trip to the bathroom more meaningful. Well, let me try to turn your mind away from this for a moment.

You see, only Metamucil (a client of ours) uses psyllium fiber. Psyllium fiber is important because it has the added benefit of lowering cholesterol. Am I changing your mind yet? Instead of focusing on its historic laxation benefit, the Metamucil brand is working to draw new consumers to the market and steal share from competing brands by driving awareness of this cholesterol-reduction benefit.

Simply using broadscale advertising to promote the Metamucil cholesterol-reduction benefit might work. Such ads would help the millions of people who suffer from high cholesterol understand that Metamucil, and other products with psyllium fiber, could help.

But we thought we could go further. We saw that people with high cholesterol need to do more than just add a little fiber to their diet. Their doctors typically ask them to change many lifestyle habits, especially what they eat and how they exercise. This insight drove us to build a more meaningful marketing solution.

Working with a multi-agency team, we created the Metamucil 30-Day Difference program. We brought together outside expertise in the form of actress and yoga instructor Brenda Strong, and the folks at Core Performance. The focus of the program is a 30-day meal and fitness planner that helps people make fundamental changes. It includes daily workout tips, recipes, and videos to help coach people in making a change. We enrolled five people as program ambassadors and showcased their personal experiences through daily diaries and weekly video segments. And we created a message board to provide a space for mutual encouragement.

I cannot share much data at this point because Metamucil is a client. In terms of meaning, I can report that we had hundreds of thousands of consumers choose to engage with the program. Most program members were returning to the site and opening emails weekly (far above industry averages). Even message board participation beat our expectations. In terms of the business results, I can only say that we were very pleased with how the program grew brand loyalty and product consumption.

I believe an extra accomplishment is that we helped the brand see that consumers would deeply engage directly with Metamucil, which is not exactly the first brand most consumers would claim they want a relationship with. This example shows how a powerful combination of a more meaningful positioning and more meaningful marketing can combine to build the business.

The program is actually coming to a close here at the end of June, mainly because we want to make this bigger and better – and beyond a quarterly promotion.  So keep an eye on the new Metamucil.