2011: Yeo Valley Organic, Marketing Communications - Case Study

A sparkling and innovative campaign transformed what had been a somewhat worthy and niche organic dairy brand into a brand megastar.

Key insights

• Yeo Valley wanted to overcome perceptions that organic meant expensive while at the same time broadening its appeal to a wider audience of families.
• The combination of a comprehensive brand revamp and an inspirational integrated campaign (including rapping farmers) linked to The X Factor gave the brand real buzz, while going viral on social media multiplied the impact of brand awareness exponentially.
• Despite facing the challenges of powerful supermarket own brands, the much larger media spend by branded competitors and its own history of limited marketing budgets, the company’s leap of faith paid off handsomely in rising sales.

Summary

The Yeo Valley dairy brand was founded in 1974 on a Somerset farm by entrepreneurial West Country farmer Roger Mead and his wife Mary. Now run by son Tim, from the outset the products have centred on being organic and passing the ‘yummy’ test.

The brand flourished by seizing the opportunities offered by the boom in organic food buying and enjoyed over a 60% share of the organic yoghurt market in 2000. Nine years later it was the country’s most successful organic dairy company.

By 2010, however, the brand needed to find a new way to connect with its target audience of families. Research revealed low awareness of the yoghurt brand as a result of limited communications and dated packaging, while consumers were increasingly feeling that organic food was too expensive.

Along with refreshing the tone of voice and packaging, an inspirational campaign centred around a twominute spot featured four rapping farmers that broke during The X Factor. It not only caught the nation’s imagination but rapidly went viral.

This was an exceptional combination of creativity and media concentration. Notably, it was a very substantial jump up in expenditure for a company that had traditionally limited such extravagances. Within three months Yeo Valley became Britain’s fastest-growing dairy brand, while there was an incremental uplift in sales of more than £3.5 million.

Facing the facts

In 2010 the organic market was under pressure. Feeling the pain of the recession, consumers who may have previously purchased organic produce had stopped. According to Mintel, the key reason cited by a majority of those surveyed was price. Organic goods had gone somewhat out of fashion and come to be seen as the domain of wealthy urban women who shopped in Waitrose and drove Volvo 4x4s. Under pressure to maintain volume growth within this niche, the brand had become increasingly dependent on a detrimental cycle of price promotions and offers.

The brand owners decided to start thinking on a bigger scale and appeal to a wider audience by setting their sights on the total yoghurt category (the organic segment represented under 8% of the total yoghurt market). They set an ambitious goal: to double share of the UK yoghurt market from 5% to 10% by 2013. The role for their strategic communications partners Bartle Bogle Hegarty was clear: take the brand into the mainstream.

Research was revealing. Brand awareness was low because of limited brand communications and dated packaging. Semiotic research also found that organic food’s image deterred potential purchasers. It had all become too ‘posh’, ‘worthy’ and ‘a bit dull’.

Interviews with Tim Mead revealed that he believed passionately that organic food should be accessible to everyone rather than being a luxury limited to upmarket farmers’ markets. This refreshingly modern view also resonated with the new target audience of everyday families, who were the UK’s biggest dairy consumers but few of whom chose the Yeo Valley brand (Figure 1).

Qualitative research showed that although these families didn’t buy organic, however, they still found the underlying values of organic produce important and appealing. Not damaging the environment and living harmoniously with nature was important to them.

But it was recognised that communicating ‘naturalness’ wouldn’t suffice. The language of ‘wholesome’ and provenance-based advertising was already overused by numerous conventional competitors and food brands. Despite having pioneered natural agriculture since the 1970s, there was a real danger that Yeo Valley’s story would become overshadowed.

Breathing new life into the brand

It was time for a fresh approach, and one which exploited the brand’s down-to-earth values in a way which would prompt a complete reappraisal of the brand. A new tone of voice was thus established, making the brand feel accessible, fun and populist. Descriptions such as ‘traditional, worthy, earnest and preachy’ were replaced with ‘modern, open, social, populist and proud’. A new packaging design was also launched to reflect the new brand values (Figure 2).

The new brand idea became ‘living in balance with nature’. Yeo Valley’s farming practices, provenance and products would all build on this positioning by celebrating the wider benefits of ‘organic’ in a way that resonated with consumers. The strapline ‘Live in Harmony’ was to be integrated across all channels.

The budget was small: £1.4 million to spend in a £45 million category. So, rather than trying to be everywhere at once, the use of media needed to be bold and decisive. All communications were aimed at encouraging fame and participation. In what was described as encouraging the move from ‘Super Bowl to Super Social’ (Figure 3), broadcast would be used to achieve high-impact mass awareness, while social media would harness this fame to create more prolonged and deeper engagement with consumers.

A big coup was the negotiation of an exclusive deal with ITV and Freemantle for The X Factor. Focusing all the efforts around the live shows would gain extra value from the media owner. As the UK’s biggest prime time show, with 14 million weekly viewers, it offered unrivalled scale and stature.

The campaign broke with a two-minute spot on Saturday, 9th October 2010. It featured four young farmers from the Yeo Valley farm describing its approach to organic agriculture. But what really got people talking and flocking to YouTube to see it again was its unusual twist: co-written by a well-known hip-hop writer, it was done as a catchy rap song which included lines such as ‘Yeo Valley’s approach is common sense, harmony in nature takes precedence...’ (Figure 4).

Digital media helped promote brand conversations and bring visitors to the farm’s website for a digital interactive, video-rich experience so they could learn more about the farm and its philosophy. The emphasis was on being transparent, informative, collaborative and encouraging users to share the content and their points of view across numerous digital channels including ITV’s The X Factor live chat room, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube etc.

Finally, a competition to win tickets to The X Factor final was devised to promote greater engagement and exploit the partnership in-store even further.

Grabbing the nation’s attention

The campaign quickly became a cultural phenomenon.

1. Advertising

The TV ad reaching unprecedented awareness levels of 43% (66% of The X Factor viewers).

• It was clearly informative, with 73% saying that ‘It told them something new about Yeo Valley,’ and highly branded (67% attributed the ad to Yeo Valley unprompted).
• It was voted by ITV viewers as one of the top 20 TV ads of 2010 and the song spent seven weeks in the top 100. It was released as a single due to popular demand.

2. Digital

It went truly viral, followed by free PR from various celebrities, conversation on Twitter and a three-minute feature on BBC regional news. The ad captured the public imagination: a third of people had heard their kids talking about the ad, while 30% of adults discussed it with their friends.

The buzz was reflected online (Figure 5). Yeo Valley became the UK’s No. 1 trending topic on Twitter (54,000+ mentions and 34+ million impressions). Bloggers followed suit with over 1,000 mentions of the campaign. The ad was also shared over 67,000 times and attracted 35,000 fans on Facebook (across 80 user-generated pages and 200 related groups). Facebook sharing drove even more online viewings, with over 1.65 million views on YouTube (along with lots of other spoof and derivative videos).

3. Competition

The on-pack competition was the brand’s most successful ever, with over 25,000 applicants to win the pair of The X Factor tickets.

4. Website visits

Hits to the website increased by 400%.

5. Packaging

The updated packaging design also contributed to the brand’s success, with 63% of consumers preferring the new packaging as more modern, eye-catching and simple.

Winning hearts and minds

Yeo Valley became top of mind for more shoppers than ever before, with spontaneous awareness of the brand rocketing at the expense of the competition. Spontaneous associations were also refreshed and positive. In addition, there were marked shifts in the brand’s values in line with the campaign’s strategic intentions.

Affinity towards the brand increased as consumers perceived the brand to be ‘a bit less posh’ and ‘a bit more like me’. Yeo Valley was now seen to be the rising star of the dairy aisle, with brand momentum rising from 36% to 44%, along with increases in brand preference from 20% to 23% and brand recommendations from 27% to 29%.

As a consequence, brand consideration and usage also increased, significantly outperforming the yoghurt market (Figure 6).

Meanwhile, the TV ad prompted two-thirds of viewers to want to try the brand and, importantly, brand affinity rose. Among those surveyed who had been online to see the ad again or visit the website, their desire to try a product was even greater, 75% versus 65%, than those who had only seen the TV .

Commercial rewards

• By the end of 2010 Yeo Valley had become the country’s fastest growing dairy brand (Figure 7). For example:
• An additional half a million consumers bought the brand.
• Penetration was up to 10.7% of households (a 22% increase).
• Loyal customers also bought more Yeo Valley products.
• Household spend grew from £3.70 to £4.30, an increase of 16%, while frequency remained constant.
• The brand’s yoghurt ended the year with annual growth of 14.9%, outperforming the yoghurt market more than two and a half times.
• Volumes were also up, doubling the market’s growth rate.
• Yeo Valley’s share of the adult yoghurt market increased from 4.9% to 5.3% (over the past 12 months) and its share of the organic market increased by 65%.

The campaign period saw an incremental uplift in sales of over £3.53 million and generated 500,000 new customers. Since £1.4 million was spent on the campaign, the campaign thus generated £2.52 of incremental sales per pound spent on advertising in the last quarter of 2010 alone. But the residual impact of the campaign would be felt for far longer.

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