What should come first: the brand campaign or the promotion? It might seem like a chicken-and-egg question but it could be argued that it is impossible to create a strong promotion without strong brand awareness already in place.
Perhaps the question should be: can you launch a brand with a promotion? It is with this in mind that McVitie's has launched biscuit brand Yumbles. The brand-owner certainly is up to it with good promotional campaigns such as Digestives' "Dunk for Britain", voted sixth in P&I's "best SP of all time" poll last year.
With Yumbles, McVitie's is taking a shot at the organics market with a range running alongside Hob Nobs and Digestives. However, despite launching in a sector that almost demands SP and getting the product into consumers' hands, McVitie's has realised it also needs to grow the brand.
Having a fairly unique product helps. Inge Jones, senior brand manager at McVitie's, says: "We decided to go into organic because it is growing and people are becoming much more concerned about their health. There was an opening in the market for an organic biscuit and that's why we decided against launching an organic Hob Nob or Digestive."
Healthy attitudes
Research shows that McVitie's move is the right one. According to Mintel, the biscuits sector has struggled and been forced to evolve as consumers become more concerned about healthy eating. Meanwhile organic has gone from being a niche sector to something more mainstream. We came up with the Yumbles brand because we wanted to stand out in the marketplace while keeping it as down-to-earth as possible," says Jones.
McVitie's aims were to get the brand out there and build up a customer base. The launch budget was relatively small at £500,000 and although it was important to build the brand, it was imperative to give consumers a taste of the product.
The challenge of making this work was presented to McVitie's roster agency, Billington Cartmell, which devised an integrated campaign with a promotional element at its heart. BCL account director Mark Sinfield says: "We had to build an awareness that it's organic but also that it's for everyone - not just for the top end consumer or a niche audience."
The result is a series of price-based promotions - covering press, radio, direct mail and in-store - primarily based around sampling. As a bonus, these can double as brand campaigns in their own right once the promotion period has ended.
A front-page partnership promotion in May, offering free product to Daily Mail readers, will launch the promotion. "We wanted to keep it mainstream," says Jones. "If we wanted just organic users, we would have gone for The Guardian."
Following this, there will be a coupon-based campaign running on 2.2 million organic milk cartons in Tesco and Sainsbury's. Cartons will feature an ad for the product, which peels away to reveal a money-off coupon. "It ties into the whole milk and cookies thing," says Sinfield.
Saturated market
Finally, once the milk-based promotion is over, one million doordrops will take place to drive sampling and awareness. Rather than highlighting the health and indulgence aspects of the products, Jones says it is more about the product being a treat that contains better ingredients.
This is all very well, but the question that hovers over the campaign, given the budgetary constraints and unknown brand, is whether something more creative could have been done. Asked whether the campaign falls between a promo and an ad campaign, Sinfield says an integrated campaign was imperative.
"From our point of view, we were much more focused on setting out the proposition and the brand. The focus is on awareness," he adds. "In terms of taking up promotions, like on-packs, it's not something to do just yet. We're taking steps towards growing a consumer base."
But promotional activity is the most important element. Jones says: "The market is changing, it's so saturated, so it's about getting people to engage. With biscuits it's about what the consumer regularly buys. If you have a big budget, you can do a big advertising campaign - but when the consumer gets in-store, unless you have something there, that awareness drops off."
As with most modern promotional campaigns, there's a web element, even though the only redemption mechanism is through couponing. Agency Inbox Digital has designed a microsite for the brand through which consumers can order coupons. "It's a new area we're going into," says Jones. "McVitie's doesn't have a site for each product. The site has information about the product and there is a tie-in with voucher site Couponstar."
If standout in the marketplace was all that was needed, then Yumbles will have an edge as a mainstream biscuit with organic credentials. The need to build the brand makes sense. But in a sector where consumers all have their own favourites it will be interesting to see whether the limited budget has been spread too thin.
Jones says the United Biscuits media plans for 2009 are currently in development and sales of Yumbles will be taken into account. So, reading between the lines, this activity could literally make or break the brand. But with marketing budgets predicted to fall across the board, launch campaigns such as this could well be what the future holds.
IN MY VIEW: 3/10
I've never done one of these before but I've said that if I ever did, I'd try to avoid a score of 5/10. It's average, no more than mediocre, and mediocrity is the enemy against which we must all battle. So, it is with unbridled joy that I announce the campaign to launch Yumbles has not fallen into the quagmire of mediocrity. It's quite some way from mediocre.
In essence, it's no more, no less than a couponing campaign designed to tap into the mass readership of the Daily Mail before being supported by a doordrop, radio advertising and some in-store activation, and all off a budget of £500k. Now, there's nothing wrong with the combination of elements. The Mail is surely liked (dare I say it, even loved) by some peculiar people out there and the focus on couponing may very well present Yumbles as an affordable, organic biscuit able to be enjoyed by the throbbing masses.
The introduction of Couponstar might be viewed as revolutionary in some quiet corner of the UK, while that of milk cartons to carry 2.1 million coupons isn't bad - although how this "milk and cookies" lark is going to be received by the Daily Mail-reading public is anyone's guess.
So what might have been done instead? Take the cookies-and-milk crusade into schools to deliver a campaign that extols the virtues of organic produce while looking to harness kids to influence non and organic-using mums/parents. Then support with a tightly targeted doordrop to households with kids living within a defined catchment of the schools and providing mums with genuine reasons to buy Yumbles above all else, before rounding everything off with tactically placed Adshel sites to prompt ongoing product recognition on school routes and adjacent to stockists.
But while I'd be only too delighted to be on the receiving end of a budget of £500k, I understand this is certainly not a figure to smile about, especially when we're talking about influencing real change in biscuit-eating behaviour - something that's about as common as a 16-year-old changing bank accounts.
- Guy Hepplewhite is managing partner at Space.