Fruit and vegetable branding directly aimed at the public is not what it used to be. This is because promotional budgets are not spent in the same way as they were in the heyday of the 1960s and 1970s, when poster campaigns on the high street and even the London Underground proudly displayed the industry’s many and varied campaign messages.
If budgets stretched far enough, the same messages even used to pop up on promotional spots on local radio and TV, and the trade itself benefited from competitions and point of sale distributed freely in wholesale markets and independent retailers by teams of charming girls.
Today, the big brands still appear on supermarket shelves, but by comparison have far less prominence. It has therefore been a fascinating experience reading about the decision to re-brand Jaffa, with a logo which, in my opinion, actually looks little different from that which has stood the industry in good stead for many years.
Jaffa is probably still the highest-profile brand in the industry, based on a long association with the unique Shamouti orange, which has been promoted over at least 40 years by the Citrus Marketing Board of Israel as the ultimate peelable orange - at an overall cost which must have run into millions.
Jaffa’s association with citrus has been so strong in the public psyche that the name is now also associated with fruit juice and a brand of biscuits, similar to the term Hoover now embracing all brands of carpet sweepers - although James Dyson is proving that nothing lasts for ever.
But the terms of reference have changed. Jaffa-branded fruit is now sourced from several countries, bringing the benefit of year-round availability and strengthening its already international image. In the past there have been efforts to extend the Jaffa concept to easy peelers, using the name Jafferines, but that was short lived and the various descriptions for easy peelers are still applied on the retail shelf, under the name Jaffa too.
A brand, however, is only as powerful as the quality of the product it represents, and just how delicate this balance can be was tested in Israel many years ago. Fruit quality in the Mediterranean as a whole was improving which, apart from increasing competition, led to a period when buyers turned away from Israel because of the unproven theory that the country’s grading standards were dropping. In reality, according to the official line, everyone else’s were going up.
Today, this is not the case. Apart from the long-established quality controls that are operating in every country’s citrus industry, there is the additional leverage of the multiples’ own specifications on site and further checks made along the distribution chain.
So with customer satisfaction virtually guaranteed, the wheel seems to have turned full circle. The question is whether any brand in a market dominated by the retailers’ own-label products can maintain its USP and, at best, command a premium.
Jaffa has a proven track record, so doubtless its progress will be closely monitored as a marketing exercise far beyond the brand’s remit.
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