Brewing for change

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Tastes and trends in hot beverages have gone through many dips and turns. Historically seen as a nation of tea drinkers, the rise of coffee-shop culture in the UK has had a significant impact on the hot drinks we choose.

While coffee has gained currency, however – whether because of connoisseurship or ubiquity – it has also faced challenges, as some people look to limit their caffeine intake as part of an increased focus on wellbeing. Tea may not have fared so well in the out-of-home environment, but fruit and herbal teas have benefited from the health and hydration spotlight.

It is within these relatively complex market conditions that Catherine Coleman-Jinks, head of marketing excellence, international marketing, at Twinings, has found herself navigating a global brand portfolio that covers Twinings and Ovaltine (known as Ovomaltine in international markets).

A food marketer all her life – starting as a graduate at United Biscuits before a long stint at Kraft – she joined Twinings in 2012 after working as a consultant. Coleman-Jinks describes Twinings as a “very grown-up organisation, with people coming from many different backgrounds culturally”.

“We’re a completely decentralised culture. We’ve got 10 countries, all doing things very differently – but what we’re not doing is sharing best practice and learning across those markets. Although we don’t want to become a centrally led business, we do want to share and learn where we can, and adapt,” she explains. This was partly the spur for her introducing a new way of working to boost innovation across the business.

“We needed to grow more of our business through innovation and new products. Not just launching a small new flavour, but through new occasions and different formats – the real step-change stuff,” Coleman-Jinks says.

At Kraft, there was a precise template and process that everyone followed for innovation, she says, but this didn’t exist at Twinings. “We had none of that. Every team was working very differently.”

So, Coleman-Jinks called in the expertise of brand, innovation and insight consultancy Brand Potential, and its managing director and founder, Mary Say, with whom she’d worked before. They started by looking at how many other organisations – from car manufacturers to FMCGs – went about innovation and decided that Twinings needed a three-year plan, to build the team’s innovation capability and establish a process that would work for all regions.

Say explains that the Brand Potential agenda had three key aspects: creating the right culture for innovation for the big-ticket, high-profile ideas; making sure there was the capability within the business, and that people were equipped with the right tools and techniques; and harnessing their creativity by building confidence.

“Those three things had to work across all markets and across both brands – Twinings and Ovomaltine – which were performing quite differently commercially,” explains Say.

“The marketing communities had different agendas because some were in a growth mindset and others weren’t. The challenging thing was that the businesses needed to pick up the framework we were providing and take it back to their own markets to implement themselves. This wasn’t a classic, global enforcing way of working – more of a coaching way of working.”

For Coleman-Jinks, it was particularly important that the framework was adaptable, because her experience at other companies had shown her how limiting a rigid framework could be. “My frustrations when I worked at other places was [the attitude of] ‘Here is the framework, you stick to it. Tough’,” she says.

Say adds: “We set up all the stages within it, and then – over the three years – we moved down the funnel. Phase one is clearly identifying the spaces and the opportunities where you want to take your business.”

This affected how insight was used within the organisation – moving from a system that had been quite back-ended on quant and concept testing to more front-ended, needs-based insight. The second year focused on injecting creativity into the process.

“We invited every market to bring a live project into the programme so they could take all the tools and techniques created the year before and deal with a particular challenge in a live-action format,” says Say.

“Year three was the nuts and bolts – building go-to-market strategies. How to optimise your concepts and not just rush to execution; being clear on the consumer need you’re targeting; getting the stakeholders on board; new creative and design techniques; naming and sub-branding, and so on.”

During this process, Cold Infuse – Twinings’ new cold-water infusion for water bottles – started to come through, and its development ran in parallel with the company building this new way of exploring innovation.

Coleman-Jinks says everyone has learned a lot going through the process for the first time and that, for future new product development (NPD), it will be faster and better. “With Cold Infuse, we went on quite a few little detours to get to where it was, while we were all learning. The next thing to come out is in Brazil, in confectionery – a completely different category. It’s been a much faster, simpler way of working to get that out of the door,” she explains.

The timing for Cold Infuse has been spot-on. When the company first considered the product, water bottle carrying in the UK was relatively low – although it was much higher in Australia, which was the lead market for this product. In recent years, however, the use of water bottles in Britain has exploded.

“A couple of hot summers, various influencers, Love Island, schools making kids bring them in – many things have happened that have meant water bottle ownership and regular use have increased dramatically. So we’ve been in the right place at the right time,” says Coleman-Jinks.

With this change-in-use occasion, however, there was much debate about where to site Cold Infuse – should it be with teas or with flavoured waters? “In the UK, it sits on the tea aisle. In Australia, they’ve done more dual siting, and put it at checkouts,” Coleman-Jinks says.

When it comes to the implementation of the innovation framework, Say says the biggest challenge was people’s concern about time – that the programme would slow them down. It was important they saw that, by investing the time upfront, it would save time further down the line, she adds.

“This is all about using [market research and insight] as an upfront strategic framework. We talk about building big strategic innovation platforms and they must be fuelled by insight. So, for each market, we went in and ran consumer co-creation to build the platforms, and took clients with us into the co-creation. We didn’t go after Twinings’ conventional target audience, as it was about pushing the boundaries, so we recruited forward-looking consumers.”

Looking beyond classic audiences and focusing on NPD has been a necessity within this changing hot-beverage market, although the macro trends can vary regionally.

“A lot of people think it’s declining, but it’s pretty solid across most markets,” says Coleman-Jinks. “Coffee, obviously, has done well in recent years. Tea has done well, but driven more by the move to infusions and health and wellbeing beverages within tea. We’ve seen that pretty much across all our tea markets.

“It’s traditional black tea that’s stable or in decline, depending on the market – in the UK, it has been in decline. Everyone says, ‘millennials don’t drink tea’ – they do; they just have a really broad repertoire.

“I was in some consumer groups a couple of weeks ago, in the States, and the dynamic is quite interesting. Some of them say, ‘Oh, I start my day with a cup of black tea,’ and someone said, ‘I start with green’. It’s doing the same thing – it’s just their first cup of tea. Twenty years ago, everyone would have said black tea, so I think it’s an exciting category. There is lots of opportunity.”

Coffee-shop culture is entrenched in the UK now and, with it, the idea of going out and buying a hot beverage. How does that affect the in-home market for Twinings?

“I worked on coffee just before the coffee-shop explosion, in the early 1990s. Coffee was really boring then, no-one was interested in it. Then everything shifted, all driven by what people were doing out of home,” says Coleman-Jinks.

“At Kraft, we launched Tassimo as an in-home solution, and Nestlé launched Nespresso, and everybody jumped on the in-home version. We haven’t seen the equivalent of that in tea. Tea out of home is still not that interesting. You go into Costa and get a teabag in a cup for £2.

“As an industry, we need to bring value to it – through things such as Kombucha and other more interesting tea-based drinks.”

Coleman-Jinks points to two dynamics within the category: the flavour-led element, where people who want something a bit healthier opt for flavoured teas and infusions; and the ‘fix it’ space, where its super-blends have more of a functional benefit, such as calming, detoxing or chamomile to help you sleep.

She says the US is ahead of the UK on the knowledge around the functional benefits of tea, although it is growing in the UK.

As with many grocery markets keeping on top of flavour trends is crucial, although Coleman-Jinks admits Twinings is not an early adopter.

“You see stuff that’s bubbling along at the bottom, then it starts to get more noise around it, and then it becomes mainstream. You can decide when you go in. Sometimes we’re too late to the party.”

So, after deciding on the flavour, how long does it take to manufacture something? “It depends on the product sourcing,” says Coleman-Jinks.

“One of our big USPs is we have our master blenders on site. We don’t buy in other people’s tea and pack it; we buy raw ingredients and flavours and herbs, and create those blends here – which puts time into the processing.”

If the raw materials were available and speed was of the essence, Twinings could get a product out in three months, she adds.

Insight is central to identifying the flavours to introduce and testing the product along its development. Coleman-Jinks explains: “At each stage in our framework, we have a recommended set of testing methodologies. They can be around the concept itself, where you’re talking to people about understanding how it will fit into their lives – is it interesting to them? Right down to specific testing around the product – how big should the teabag be, what shape, what material? All of those things are tested.”

While Brand Potential worked with Twinings on its innovation framework, most of its innovation testing is done by Nielsen and it works with Millward Brown on brand tracking.

Introducing Cold Infuse has not only taken Twinings out of the hot-beverages category in the UK, it has also made the company reassess its segmentations and recognise that consumers don’t necessarily think of hot and cold beverages as separately as the company does.

It has an online community in the UK and has used techniques such as neuroscience-based testing and eye-tracking. “With the old consumer groups sitting around tables – or even in people’s homes – you’re only ever getting what they want to tell you,” says Coleman-Jinks, who believes research and insight needs to answer the big, general questions.

“How can we fit into their lives better? What is it they need? Then it’s about trying to see how you can create solutions,” she says. “It’s getting to the big, attitudinal stuff. People don’t talk about it. It’s hard, isn’t it?”