Cello Cheese: Building a conversational moat for a consumer brand

Cello Cheese is a premium FMCG cheese brand sold primarily through supermarket distribution. Mike Currie, the Marketing Director, came to us with a strategic problem common to consumer brands: the brand sells through retailers, which means it never owns the relationship with the consumer who actually eats the cheese.

Cookie deprecation, ATT, declining Meta attribution, and inflation in CPM costs made the existing playbook (paid Meta + retailer co-op) less efficient every quarter. Mike's question was strategic, not tactical: what does a direct relationship with our consumers look like when we don't sell direct?

This wasn't a "build a bot to take orders" engagement. Cello doesn't sell online. The brief was: what does the conversational data layer look like for a premium FMCG brand that wants to know its consumers without selling DTC?

We proposed treating Cello's social channels — Instagram in particular — as the front door to a first-party data programme. Recipe content, pairing content, and seasonal cheese-board inspiration would all route through conversational flows that captured email, preference data, and consent for future contact, all in exchange for content the consumer genuinely wanted.

The result is a consumer data layer that survives algorithm changes, attribution loss, and platform shifts. Cello owns the relationship even though Cello doesn't own the transaction.

Content as the wedge

Recipe content, cheese-pairing guides, and seasonal cheese-board PDFs were the lead magnets. The bot delivered them in exchange for email and a preference declaration (favourite cheese type, recipe frequency, dietary preferences). High completion rates because the content was actually useful.

Consumer panel inside the inbox

A subset of opted-in consumers became a perpetual research panel. The bot ran quick polls — new flavour reactions, pack-size preferences, retailer experience — that informed product and packaging decisions. Insights that would have cost £50k in agency research, generated for the cost of message-template approval.

Retailer-agnostic data ownership

Every data point captured belonged to Cello, not to the supermarket and not to the platform. When Mike presented to retailers, he could show consumer preference data the retailers themselves didn't have access to — which changed the dynamics of trade marketing conversations.

The Cello engagement was an ongoing strategic build rather than a single project. The initial 6-week sprint laid the foundation; the team has continued to evolve it.

The Cello pattern applies to any consumer brand that sells through distribution rather than direct — FMCG, packaged goods, alcohol, beauty, household products, even some categories of fashion. The wedge is the same: trade useful content for first-party data, build a consumer relationship the platform can't take away, surface insights that change strategic conversations.

What this isn't is a quick-win engagement. There's no 9X stat at the end of 90 days. The value compounds over time as the data asset grows and as the brand's strategic dependency on third-party platforms decreases. The brands that started this work in 2024-2025 are now significantly less exposed to iOS privacy changes and Meta attribution loss than peers who didn't.

The right fit profile is a brand with a marketing director who thinks beyond the current quarter and a CFO patient enough to fund infrastructure that pays back over years, not months.