ROSEMONT, IL: Housewares company World Kitchen, whose brands include CorningWare, Corelle, and Pyrex, has selected Zeno Group as AOR.
The company, which picked Zeno after a competitive review, has tasked the agency with handling PR for all of its brands, said Grant Deady, MD of Zeno's Chicago office. The account's budget is in the high six-figure range.
The company was previously represented by Weber Shandwick.
Zeno, with a team of six staffers on the account, will work to engage World Kitchen's core fanbase of women, as well as to introduce its brands to Millennials – “that next generation of young chefs,” explained Deady.
The firm will target bloggers and traditional print, online, and broadcast outlets, as well as promote World Kitchen brands on social media, said Deady. He added that Zeno is handling social media for the company's Snapware food-storage container brand at the moment. It anticipates working on several other brands' social platforms in the future because food and recipe photo sharing is popular online.
“In a lot of those photos that you see people posting every day, many times those are World Kitchen products [the food is being cooked or served in]. We just want to make sure that we are capturing all of that and giving these brands their due credit in terms of the hugely important roles they play in people's homes every single day,” explained Deady.
Community management and strategic alliances with influencers, such as celebrity chef Emeril Lagasse, are also included in Zeno's scope of work.
“Our recent collaboration with chef Emeril Legasse for Snapware launches next month and is a perfect example of how we are working with Zeno to strengthen brand awareness with experts who lend credibility as well as a means to more actively engage with our consumers socially,” said Kris Malkoski, North America president at World Kitchen, in an emailed statement. “We were also drawn to Zeno's deep understanding of our female targets and the way in which they adopt brands into their everyday lives.”
Deady added that the “traditional cooking season” used to refer to the time from Thanksgiving to Christmas, but now it occurs from Halloween to the Super Bowl.
“We're going to come out with a strategy that helps people understand the roles that different World Kitchen brands can play during that 100-day time period,” he said.
World Kitchen also plans to launch products next year, which Zeno will promote, Deady said. The agency will manage the company's presence at the 2013 International Home + Housewares Show in March, as well.
Other World Kitchen brands include EKCO, Magnalite, OLO, Revere, Visions, Baker's Secret, Chicago Cutlery, and OLFA.
A Weber representative could not be immediately reached for comment on the account.
