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From Battenberg to French Fancies, Mr Kipling is as familiar to British consumers as a cup of tea on a drizzly afternoon – not to mention being the owner of one of the best-known straplines in the country. Despite the brand’s ubiquity – 55% of the UK have had Mr Kipling in their house within the past year – 2017 was a disappointing year for sales, with an internal review finding its advertising and pack design were underperforming. In short, Mr Kipling needed a new lease of life.

“There’s been a feeling that we haven’t really been moving with the times. We’re a well-loved brand, but quite nostalgic,” says Catherine Haigh, insights controller for sweet treats at Premier Foods. “We really wanted to reignite the love for the brand and we felt strongly that emotive positioning was the way to do that.”

Premier Foods knew from the work it had done with Bisto that emotion was the approach it wanted to take, but it had to feel current. At a time when ‘purpose-driven’ advertising has become somewhat clichéd, it had to be based on reality – not just people’s reality, but the reality of the product.

“Our positioning had to feel like a natural fit for Mr Kipling, not something that’s lofty or huge. Taking it away from this nostalgic place, but making it meaningful and relevant today – getting that balance right was so important to us,” says Haigh.

The company worked with insight, strategy and innovation consultancy The Leading Edge on consumer research, to understand the place of Mr Kipling and the category of ambient packaged cake generally, while remaining pragmatic about what role the brand should play. “Yes, we want to drive purpose, but I think we need to be realistic about our role in people’s lives,” says Haigh.

Sophie Cavanagh, brand and innovation consultant at The Leading Edge, agrees. “You often get these really lofty brand positionings about transforming people’s lives – but a lot of brands can’t, and they shouldn’t, because that’s not what they’re there to deliver.”

So the challenge for the researchers was to find a positioning that would feel universal enough for a brand as mainstream as Mr Kipling, but that still meant something, without being too philosophical – “not something that’s watered down to mean something to everyone and no one,” says Cavanagh.

Initial focus groups – with Mr Kipling fans, and frequent and infrequent buyers of packaged cake – focused on big, exploratory questions, such as asking participants their life motto. The research found that ambient cake isn’t associated with indulgence, and consumers don’t feel guilty about eating it. Rather, it’s an everyday treat.

After a workshop with Haigh and her team, The Leading Edge conducted additional focus groups to co-create and test the positioning, settling on the concept of celebrating the little moments that mean the most in people’s daily lives.

The research identified the things that matter to people, and what Mr Kipling could genuinely deliver on as a brand, according to Cavanagh – as opposed to “something that’s really highfalutin but not credible to ambient packaged cake, or relevant to people’s day to day lives.”

From spell book to magician

Validating the insights gathered in the research came from perhaps an unlikely source – Instagram. When Cavanagh did a rudimentary search for the hashtag #mrkipling, she found people were using it unprompted to share their treat moments on the platform. “The fact that people placed value on little things such as sharing a Mr Kipling cake with a colleague was really validating for us,” says Cavanagh.

“They’re not transforming people’s lives or game changers – they’re just nice little moments.”

This also helped Haigh when it came to getting buy-in for the positioning from the leadership team. “We were able to show our senior team that people were posting these moments they are having with our brand. That was our intent; we just wanted to capture what’s already out there.”

Grounding the concept in reality was important, not just for the brand positioning, but for tracking return on investment and maintaining a close relationship between insight and strategy – something Haigh feels strongly about.

“Once you have those insights, your job is to hang on to them for dear life,” she says. Any time campaign results are presented internally, she adds a slide to remind the team of the process behind the work.

“Sometimes, ads are communicated internally and externally through awards ceremonies, as if they came from nowhere. We’re in quite a tricky time in insight at the moment – we’re always having to explain why we need to spend that money. It’s so important for us, as a profession, to make sure we remember to blow our own trumpets.”

Haigh adds: “People say: ‘you’re the spell book, not the magician’, but sometimes I think we need to step up and be a bit more of the magician. It’s about making sure you’re promoting insight as a function for everybody for the future.

“I have been at a lot of conferences recently where people are talking about keeping back 10% of their budgets for that internal sell – you would never have heard that 10 years ago.”

That internal communication includes stakeholder interviews and ‘rewind’ projects before new research is started, to learn from past work.
One year on from the Mr Kipling research, Haigh held a workshop with the team to discuss how the positioning could be used beyond just the ad and rolled out more clearly via social media, innovation and internally. Beyond a purpose-based positioning, the brand is also trying to establish how it could incorporate its positioning internally in its values and interview process.

Haigh’s next big focus is on innovation, by identifying opportunities for new and developed product pipelines for both Mr Kipling and Cadbury. “I’d love to disrupt the category, but it’s not just down to me,” she laughs.

To support this, Premier Foods is undertaking qualitative research with consumers to understand their lives and the occasions where sweet treats are playing a role. “We will be identifying the opportunities that we want to go after, whether that’s health and wellbeing trends and understanding the implications of that for cake, or looking at the needs behind premiumisation – is it some kind of personal reward or togetherness?

“We are looking at ways of coming up with stuff that’s genuinely different, rather than doing the same thing and expecting to get a different result.”

Little Thief

McCann, the creative agency behind the ‘Little Thief’ ad, was involved in The Leading Edge’s focus groups from the beginning, says Cavanagh. “McCann saw and heard, verbatim, what consumers were saying, and where our recommendation and positioning came from – it could see the trail.”

That closeness is reflected in the spot, which aired in March and shows a young boy sneaking around a family party to get his hands on a Mr Kipling Angel slice. But, lo and behold, he isn’t taking the treat for himself, but as a gift for his surly teenage sister who is studying at home.

Premier Foods worked with Hall & Partners to test and develop the comms idea and scripts, giving Premier Foods guidelines and rules around its creative script development for future work. “The research not only informed our current execution, but will live on and continue to inform all of our creative development going forward,” explains Haigh. She adds that the guidelines were taken on board by McCann and are now referred to internally as the brand’s ‘Recipe for Success’.

The company also worked with System 1 on pre-testing for the ad, using the agency’s database, while tests of the brand’s new pack design were conducted with PRS In Vivo.

Sales of Mr Kipling were up by 9.8% six months after the ad aired on 18 March 2018, according to IRI data.

This article was first published in Issue 24 of Impact.