“In recent years there’s been one big apple a decade. In the 1970s it was Gala, the 80s saw the emergence of Braeburn and the 90s, Pink Lady. This decade it will be Jazz.”
So says Steve Maxwell, marketing manager with Worldwide Fruit, laying down the gauntlet for the rapidly expanding branded apple sector.
Branding is not something that has come naturally to the fresh produce industry. When you’re dealing with tight margins, the last thing people want to spend money on is marketing.
But with competition getting tougher and returns ever lower the industry is starting to have to look for routes out of the valley of constant deflation, and what better way than through branding?
A high quality, consistent, branded apple can command a premium price and it is easy to see why that might prove attractive to the sector.
And Jazz is the new heir to the throne, say its exponents. Although it won’t be without competition, Pink Lady is still hungry for market share, newer varieties, such as Cameo are also looking to climb to the top of the pile and the likes of Braeburn, Gala and Cape branded apples are not going to disappear without a fight.
There certainly will have to be some element of cannibalisation within the apple market, but Maxwell is keen to point out there’s still plenty of space.
“We’re looking to develop Jazz into a £25 million brand in the next five years, and that means selling 13 million kilos. While those numbers sound big, in terms of volume that is 2.5 per cent of the market and only 3.5 per cent of its value. It’s a big market.”
But Jazz is not alone in looking for share. Cameo is the other new kid on the block, and members of its club are hungry for success.
Adrian Barlow, marketing co-ordinator for Cameo, says: “We’re very keen to see it established as a strong, consistent, brand.
“We’re fortunate in having a product that has outstanding taste. However our biggest disadvantage is that it doesn’t look stunning.”
The result has been a marketing campaign which aims to play down the emphasis on appearance. “We came up with the strap-line ‘the secret’s inside, taste it’. We’re trying to encourage consumers not to judge the apple on its appearance,” adds Barlow.
In a bid to support this, Barlow says they have been carrying out tasting sessions to give consumers the chance to try the apple, which has proved successful with conversion rates high.
However, the biggest problem for the Cameo Club members is the lack of volume. “It’s hard to market a brand when it disappears from the shelves for half the year.” Barlow is working on raising awareness but he says that needs to go hand in hand with increased volumes.
Last season there were around 400 tonnes of Cameo available from the UK and Barlow says he is anticipating around 600t of English product next season. Around 4,500t of the variety in total are currently grown in Europe with an aim to increase production to around 12,000 tonnes by 2008.
The lack of volumes meant the fruit, both UK and imported, was only on sale in the UK for three months from January to the beginning of April.
However, perhaps a hindrance to the fruit’s volume growth has been the clubs insistence on quality. Barlow says: “We made a decision that no class II product would be marketed. We don’t want the brand to be undermined by substandard product. Getting consistency is vitally important”
Of course, both Jazz and Cameo make no bones about the fact that they’re treading in the footsteps of Pink Lady. As WWF’s Maxwell says: “It’s a good model to follow.”
In terms of branding, Pink Lady was something of a trial blazer in the apple sector, and has certainly lain down the gauntlet for other brands following in its wake. Over the last four years, the apple has grown by around 116 per cent, says Andy Macdonald, md of Pink Lady’s UK marketers Coregeo, going from 650,000 cases to 1.4 million cases in the same period.
And they’re not resting on their laurels either, says Macdonald: “I think we’re now about the sixth most popular apple in the UK, behind types like Granny Smith and Braeburn.
“Last year we had around 38 per cent brand awareness, and when you consider that Pink Lady has only really been around for five to six years, that’s really good. But you’ve got to keep going, keep driving.”
He’s not too worried about the competition coming from the new tranche of branded varieties: “They’re different types of apples and have their own merits. They will either succeed or fail on those merits,” he says.
“Competition is healthy, but I think it will be the older varieties that have to make way for the up-and-coming apples as people’s tastes change.”
Of course if you want to have a brand, be it an apple, orange or pot noodle, you’ve got to promote it, and to do that it means spending money, not something easily done in the fresh produce industry.
Macdonald says the thinking has got to change: “Everybody does marketing, but the fresh produce industry. People think they’ll have a kind retailer who will push it for them and it will spread by word of mouth.
“But we’re in a business world, and we have to support our products if we believe they are worth supporting.”
WWF’s Maxwell agrees: “This year we’ve spent around £50,000 marketing Jazz, but we’re going to have to see a stepped increase in that every year, particularly if we’re looking to double volume year-on-year.”
Of course, getting the money is the hard part however, as Maxwell says: “It’s easy to sell 40,000 kgs, but it’s a different matter when you’re talking about 400,000 kgs.”
But even for the bigger players in the industry, finding the cash is not always that easy. Capespan’s trading director Martin Dunnett says: “We spend not an insignificant sum on promoting our brand, around several hundreds of thousands of pounds, but we’d still struggle to mount a really major consumer campaign because margins are so tight.”
And can the licensed apple brands like Jazz, Pink Lady and Cameo survive into the future? For some, doubts are already starting to show, as Dunnett says: “With Pink Lady, while we support it, it does have a lot of question marks over it in the long term. Growers returns have been more difficult recently than in the past.” And Asda’s decision to stock the variety Cripps Pink in place of the brand could yet spread through the retailers.
Dunnett says if the growers are not making the money then they will be reluctant to pay the premium to promote the brand. And as we’ve said before, if you don’t promote the brand, you lose your market equity.
As Macdonald says: “Brands are important because you’ve got to get people to recognise your product. Support for that is essential. Maybe in 20 years time we’ll not have to advertise, but then again, I don’t see brands like Pepsi cutting back on advertising.”
Capespan certainly falls into the category of the long established brand with Cape, yet the company continues to promote the name, carrying out radio advertising and innovative PR activities.
“We recently had a sweet amnesty, urging children to hand over their sweets in exchange for an apple,” says Dunnett, who also roped in ex-Atomic Kitten Liz McClarnon to promote the campaign.
Of course, having the brand and promoting it to consumers outside a store is one thing, but inside the store, options become limited.
While there are some obvious long-term exceptions, fresh produce has notoriously been a relatively brand free arena. This has allowed the retailers to firmly make their mark on the category, and they are not going to give that up without good reason. As one buyer recently said, branded fruit has to offer a point of difference from non-branded produce.
On apples that means its got to offer something new to consumers, be that on taste, quality or consistency, or perhaps more importantly, all three.
Maxwell says Jazz delivers on all three and as a result has received a great deal of support from the retailers: “It’s not listed in Asda yet, but everyone else has it. We ran a holiday promotion in Sainsbury’s giving consumers the chance to go to New Orleans.”
Promotions and tasting sessions were also condusted in a wide range of retailers, generating excellent responses. “We need to adopt guerrilla tactics, popping up in places people wouldn’t expect and getting the apple into people’s hands,” adds Maxwell.
Away from special promotions, guerrilla ambushes and tasting sessions, simply getting your brand noticed in-store is a challenge in itself. With space a premium, you need to make your apple stand out on shelf.
Cameo’s Barlow says the campaign has worked hard to come up with distinctive labels and tray logos: “You need to have well designed packaging to catch the eye, however that’s difficult in supermarkets, unless you’ve got your apples in polybags.” He says they were also supporting the apples in-store with leaflets.
So there are definitely challenges for those embarking into the branded sector, but like many things, the greater the risk, the greater the reward, and when you talk about establishing a £25m brand in just five years, the rewards are clear for everyone to see.
LE CRUNCH TIME FOR PROMOTION
“Le Crunch is now a worldwide brand,” says Jacques Vanoye, president of the French Apple Marketing Commission. “We now export all over the world as Le Crunch, not just to the UK; we’ve made it a uniform brand for French apples.”
With French apples right at the start of the season, he says plans are still being made on how best to promote the fruit under the Le Crunch brand, although promotions were likely to begin from the end of September.
“We’re probably likely to follow a similar programme to last year, with things like school activities and working with the supermarkets, however we are looking to different things and discussing ways forward.”
As ever, the difficult part of trying out different concepts is getting the cash: “We need to put the money up, we want to increase the budget, but it’s the growers who have to pay for it and we’re not Coca-Cola.”
Increasing budgets for marketing is difficult to do at any time, but following last years difficult season for French growers, it is even harder.
The UK is a vital market for Le Crunch, and one of the oldest. Vanoye says: “It’s still our main market and we know it well. Our brand is well known by consumers, out of all our markets, Le Crunch has the highest awareness in the UK, possibly because it’s where we began with the brand and we’ve promoted it well over the years.”
However, he says promotion, even in a well-established market like the UK, is vital. “If we don’t promote enough then maybe the brand will suffer. So we have to do something and we need to go on promoting. If you have a brand, you must spend money.”
PINK LADY DIPS ITS OARS IN CLEAR WATER
A change in promotional direction proved a worthwhile gamble for Pink Lady producers.
Having conducted a number of promotional campaigns aimed at women, Andy Macdonald, md of Coregeo, the company which manages the trade mark in the UK, decided to change tack.
“Previous consumer communications ranged from women’s press advertising campaigns and media relations, to the Glastonbury festival last year,” says Macdonald. “Our awareness level amongst women out-strips men and we wanted to focus on a new target audience of men, rather than continue to preach to the same people.”
That new focus brought about the sponsorship of a team of rowers aiming to cross the Atlantic in record-breaking time.
While some in the industry had doubts about the move, Macdonald and his team threw themselves into what became the Pink Lady Atlantic row - essentially four men in a shocking pink boat.
The gamble paid off and what happened next has been well documented, with the world media seizing on the story of the heroically pink attempt being thwarted at the last minute.
Macdonald says: “The rowers were just 300 miles from their destination when a freak wave caused the boat to split in two.”
He claims before the disaster and dramatic rescue by banana boat, the Pink Lady brand had achieved over 200 million ‘opportunities to see’ in the UK media. “This figure grew to over five billion as the world’s news was gripped by news of the epic row.”
Overall, according to a recent TNS survey of 2,000 consumers, commissioned by Coregeo, total brand awareness for Pink Lady has grown by 53 per cent year-on-year, increasing 20 percentage points to 58 per cent.
But despite this success, Macdonald says there is still work to be done: “There’s still a long way to go before Pink Lady reaches its full potential in the UK, so there are many opportunities to expand on already healthy sales.”
He said the fact more consumers are recognising the brand is reassuring: “Ultimately, we are fighting a war against the highly competitive market of branded processed foods that are high in fat, sugar and salt.”
He says while promotional budgets remained small compared to the big FMCG giants, they were determined to continue spending the money effectively. “Pink Lady growers invest more into support for their apple than any other grower group.
“We have a responsibility to nurture consumer demand and promote the healthy eating message, which we will continue to do in an innovative style of benefit to growers, retailers and the public like.”
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