With cash-strapped consumers increasingly opting for cosy nights in rather than dining out, retailers are looking to follow suit and target customers with tempting new offers to tap into the in-home eating trend.
Valentine’s Day is no exception; in fact, it’s the perfect occasion to promote certain fruits and vegetables as “aphrodisiac must-haves”. Think fresh figs, strawberries, passion fruit, and even peas. The Yes Peas! campaign, backed by growers and frozen food suppliers, has been given a push by recipes illustrated with heart-shaped paraphernalia - perfect for a “Hap-pea Valentine’s Day”.
Promoted by Kenyon Communications, the campaign has been running for eight years and finding new angles is crucial, so while consumers might not automatically associate Valentine’s Day with peas, it’s an excuse as good as any to increase consumer awareness. Hence the green pea with pancetta and soda bread recipe, which could make a great starter for a home-cooked romantic dinner.
To go with that you’ll need a salad and, as if on cue, Florette recently unveiled a special on-pack Valentine promotion for its premium Duo range, which comprises lambs lettuce and wild rocket plus lambs lettuce and Ruby Chard, both priced from £1.19. The promotion was launched on 16 January and will be running in-store for four weeks to increase sales. Customers who buy three bags of salad from the same retailer can collect points, which can be redeemed online for a £5 gift card towards a bottle of wine from the same retailer.
The promotion will be supported by digital marketing activity through Florette’s Facebook pages with Valentine recipe content. The brand’s marketing manager Elaine Smith explains: “The Florette brand has a strong track record of marketing investment that engages with existing consumers, as well as attracting significant new users. We’re confident that this promotion will capture the imagination of consumers looking for a helping hand with their in-home Valentine celebrations and provide a welcome reward to the New Year shopping basket. The promotion will also provide a welcome boost to the fixture, injecting interest and inspiration to stimulate sales and category growth early in the year.”
The salad range will play a major part in Florette’s £5 million marketing investment in 2012, following its success last year. The Duo range won the greatest distribution listing of all branded bagged salad NPD launched last summer, delivering £1.1m in sales to date across Tesco, Asda and Sainsbury’s, translating into £450,000 worth of incremental sales for the Florette brand and equating to 38 per cent of total premium salad growth, figures from Nielsen show.
While money-saving promotions are always well-received, in today’s competitive market brands have to find new and innovative ways to market themselves, and Valentine’s Day provides an excellent opportunity to do so. One example came from Charli Morgan at The Cult PR, promoting a hot chilli and sweet pepper kit available from Bouf.com. According to Morgan, the grow-your-own kit offers couples “the chance to spice up their love lives by letting the chilli grow and flourish... along with their bedroom antics!” The tongue-in-cheek claim is based on the fact that chilli peppers contain the chemical capsaicin, which make them spicy and also stimulates the body’s nerve endings and increases the heart rate. Explaining why home-grown chillis are the must-have accompaniment for Valentine’s Day, Morgan says: “When you’ve lovingly grown them yourselves, they won’t be affected by nasty chemical processes which can damage their aphrodisiac qualities, and it’s a free and tasty way to spice up your love life.”
If chilli-enhanced bedroom antics sound a bit too spicy for your liking, there is always the more familiar promotional technique of celebrity endorsement to fall back on. Celebrity news sites went into a frenzy last week over what was reported to be “Pippa Middleton’s Valentine tips”. The suggestions, which appeared in Middleton family online magazine The Party Times, included celebrating the day even if you’re single by throwing a Valentine’s party for your friends. One tip, which will surely send fruit sales through the roof, reads: “For a fun or romantic Valentine’s dessert idea how about dipping marshmallows and fruit skewers of banana, grapes and strawberries into a molten chocolate fountain. Everyone can join in - just make sure you have napkins at the ready as things may get messy!”
Delectable as that sounds, the fact that the tip went global in a matter of hours is clearly down to what has been branded the “Pippa effect”. As any PR guru will tell you, never underestimate the power of celebrity. -
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