How clever marketing changed perceptions for iconic Kiwi brands
In the new series of Facebook’s Face 2 Face podcast, we travel to New Zealand to hear how three iconic brands have been revitalised by reimagining their approaches to their audiences.
Almost everyone worries to some degree about what other people think of them. What people think matters to us.
For businesses, what customers think of you is often the difference between success and struggle. If you are forgettable, break trust or become known for the wrong thing, it can devastate your bottom line. Brand perception is one of the very tangible things every marketer should be monitoring closely.
The new series of Facebook’s Face 2 Face podcast travels to New Zealand and goes deep with three household brands – The Warehouse Group, Whittaker’s and the New Zealand Olympic Committee – and their agencies, to understand how they have moved to change perceptions and the impact it has had on them.
Building trust with Whittaker’s
Chocolate maker Whittaker’s is a 120-year-old Kiwi company which still prides itself on the fact you can phone head office and actually speak to Mr Whittaker. Two of them, in fact.
Today, though, being local is not enough. As Hannah Eastwood, business director for MBM, Whittaker’s media agency, explains: “In the category we play in, it is easy to be out-shouted. We basically play in a market that is very heavily dominated by global competitors. And so it requires us, as a Kiwi company with not as big pockets, to really think differently.”
Whittaker’s had an amazing product and deep affinity – those childhood memories of millions of Kiwi children being handed a treat. That meant Kiwis felt good about the brand, and had a trust in it. But today loyal customers expect a dialogue with the brand. So in 2010 Whittaker’s marketing manager Jasmine Currie decided they needed to build out their digital presence, and in particular focus on its social channels.
She says: “You can’t have anything to hide if you want to be an active brand on social or digital these days. I think the more honest and trustworthy you are the better the results will be.”
For Whittaker’s this means engaging in an open and genuine dialogue.
“We have price increases from time to time – cocoa prices fluctuate,” explains Currie. “A lot of brands would either decrease the size of their chocolate blocks or have a price increase, but try and keep it hidden.
“The first time we did it we put a Facebook post out to all our fans to tell them we’re having a price increase soon, giving them a chance to stock up, because we don’t actually have anything to hide.”
That honesty paid off, with dozens of responses like “I will be happy to pay more” and “all good still the best chocolate” showing the level of love the brand had accrued.
Whittaker’s has been the most trusted brand in New Zealand for the last eight years, and during that time (when its Facebook community has swelled from 80,000 to more than 800,000) its flagship Creamy Milk bar became the best-selling in its category – ahead of global powerhouse brands.
Going from cheap to value with The Warehouse Group
In 2016 The Warehouse Group, New Zealand’s biggest retailer which encompasses seven brands selling everything from t-shirts to tents and TVs, got a very rude shock.
After 30 years of local dominance the reality of globalisation was starting to bite, massive competitors were opening up stores and online offerings were tantalising customers with the promise of cheap and convenient products. That year its profits slumped by 75%.
Change was needed, and fast. But changing a traditional company with a lot of internal complexity is no mean feat. Each brand had its own marketing team, each with their own agencies and competing priorities.
Jonathan Waecker stepped into the challenge of unifying these brands. Not only did he not have any retail experience with a background in entertainment and tech marketing, he was also not a local – hailing from the USA. The biggest issue was changing brand perception. As he explains: “When I started the brand was just really hammering home ‘cheap cheap cheap’. The Warehouse was known for cheap stuff from offshore.”
But in the internet age where competitors can offer bargain-basement prices because they do not have the overheads, being cheap no longer cuts it. Waecker knew he had to transform the brand and turn it into an ‘Everyday Low Prices’ offering.
“We started focusing on quality, but we had to make sure that the pricing trigger was always there,” he explains. “So you would show this unbelievably beautiful set of bedding and then you’d wrap it up with, like, all this could be yours for $19.
“We hammered that home really, really hard for about a year. We started to see our quality metrics move. Now we’re moving into phase two which is we’re trying to drive urgency.”
What impact has this had? In 2019 the company’s profits leapt 26% – at a time when retailers of all kinds are feeling the pinch.
Giving people something to think about with the New Zealand Olympic Committee
Sport is a national obsession for New Zealanders. For its size the country punches well above its weight at the Olympics, and is one of the most engaged nations with the quadrennial event.
But for the New Zealand Olympic Committee (NZOC), which is responsible for raising money from sponsors to send New Zealand competitors to a host of different athletic events, the challenge was to get Kiwis thinking about sports which don’t get the headlines day-in-day-out.
NZOC commercial director Sharon van Gulick explains: “every four years people are going to turn their TV on for two weeks and they’re going to be glued to the screen and they’re going to love it. And then be going to kind of forget about it until you know the next time around.
“So if you think about the Olympic brand not as a brand, but a product, you’ve got all eyes on that product for a two week period and then a colossal amount of time when there isn’t. So how do we engage but be consistent at the same time? So how do we keep people interested?”
Agency Saatchi & Saatchi came up with a simple idea – a new brand platform Earn the Fern. The idea was simple, using digital, and in particular social channels, to provide a platform for the athletes who are training every day for a shot at wearing the Silver Fern, and giving them a storytelling platform to engage beyond their regular community.
That came alongside a larger rebrand to call the athletes travelling to these various competitions the New Zealand Team, uniting rugby players with rowers, equestrian, snowboarders, trampolining and even lawn bowls.
Through the Commonwealth Games in 2018 and now looking at the Olympics in Tokyo in 2020 the NZOC has been growing its share of voice, capturing more attention and awareness for the sports and athletes going to compete, and most importantly securing commercial partners to actually fund it all.
As van Gulick explains, brand sentiment has moved eight points, adding: “We have been able to secure the highest ever level of financial support and investment of the team and the greatest number of brand partners who are on that journey with us.
“The fact that both are tracking well above where they’ve ever been before and they are consistently on the rise is a really strong indicator that we’re getting this right.”
To hear more of these stories download the Face 2 Face podcast by following this link, and listen to past episodes of the series from Facebook.