If you have recently taken to enjoying the dreaded Brussels sprout with renewed vigour, you may well have been one of the many tens of millions of people that were touched by the Learn to Love a Sprout campaign.
The winner of the Pr2 Marketing Campaign of the Year accolade at this year’s Re:fresh Awards ceremony in May, Learn to Love a Sprout was a creative and visually impressive project aimed at boosting sales of the oft-maligned vegetable.
And Arbor London, the branding and marketing team behind the highly original promotion, was delighted to pick up the award. “We were extremely surprised to win, but very appreciative that our unusual creativity had been recognised,” owner Dorian Perry tells FPJ. The pitch included visuals of sprouts piled high à la the Ferrero Rocher television advertising campaign of several years ago, and wrapping paper decorated with sprouts.
“The campaign had a high humour content and was quite unusual, and I didn’t expect our clients to go for it wholeheartedly, but it was a successful pitch and the campaign kicked off in earnest in August 2006,” says Perry. Kettle Produce and Manor Fresh were the primary sponsors of the campaign, which finally wound up in March this year.
“The main thing we did not want for Learn to Love a Sprout was for it to focus around Christmas,” explains Perry. “None of the material was Christmas-led, and we focused on different things at different times of year - for example, pre-Christmas we taught people about boiling sprouts for no more than eight minutes and offered them alternative contemporary recipes, and then we did a raft of ideas around the January health kick, with our ethno-botanist James Wong - who studies the interaction between plants and man - talking on the radio and in magazine articles about the nutritional benefits of sprouts.”
The figures speak for themselves - one retailer reported a 20 per cent rise in sales of the vegetable, and the campaign generated readership of 80 million across a circulation of 39m in newspapers and lifestyle magazines such as Closer, Heat and Chat, which Perry says all came back to him saying, “you’ve made sprouts cool”. The vegetable also made a splash when it was mentioned on the Chris Evans Radio 2 programme and various local radio stations throughout the campaign.
“Learn to Love a Sprout was a huge challenge - we had to consider it long and hard, but then we looked at Marmite and its ‘you either love it or hate it’ advertising slogan, and how that has managed a successful revival, and realised we could do it. Lots of journalists came back to us and said they really appreciated the humour of the campaign. We are hoping to revive the project this winter as a result.”
But the company has far from rested on its laurels since being crowned a Re:fresh winner. Arbor London has recently launched a campaign for Sunrise, the red kiwi, on behalf on Worldwide Fruit, reworking the British Egg Board’s 1960s marketing campaign - ‘Go to Work on an Egg’ - by encouraging consumers to ‘Go to Work on a Kiwi’.
Over the summer months, Arbor was also busy redesigning Tesco’s top-fruit and citrus packaging, and the new look was rolled out in October. Designer Sue Hurst, who has worked full time for the company since 2003, explains that they were asked to show greater provenance on the packaging, bringing back the concept that the fruits are natural products. “We used inspirational photography, as Tesco is making a big effort to reference the origins of its fruit and generally make its packaging more interesting. We received really good feedback when we took the new designs to a consumer panel,” she says.
Arbor also spent the summer organising a marketing drive for the Living Salads brand, promoting the products, which grow inside the pots they are sold in, via magazine articles and BBC Radio London. The company has similarly notched up a firm success with its annual Mr Pippy British apple campaign, which kicked off in 2005. The highlight of that initiative was an ice-cream van decorated with the Union Jack, which toured the country distributing free apples to passers-by.
On the European market, the firm organises the Bimi (known here as tenderstem broccoli) campaign on behalf of Sakata Seeds, which is rolling out in retailers such as ICA in Sweden, The Co-op in Denmark, Albert Heijn in the Netherlands, Globus in Germany, Delhaize in Belgium and The Co-op in Switzerland, with a launch soon due in France. “Bimi is a rolling campaign, as the vegetable is produced year round in Africa, and we are now looking to expand the promotion to the Czech Republic as well,” says Perry.
“Another aspect of our business is intellectual property work with patents and trademarks. The produce industry has suffered by often being unable to retain its intellectual property, and we are trying to give this right back to our clients, helping them protect their brands.”
At Fruit Logistica 2008, Arbor London will be teaming up with AAA from Kenya, helping the African firm prepare a stand to showcase its wide range of products. “Another key element of our day-to-day activities is assisting companies in putting together presentations, for example about their new products, varieties or ideas for sale and price promotions, and giving them a very visual and slick presentation to show off,” says Hurst. “We do not use powerpoint at all - the major retail buyers get so many presentations just consisting of charts and graphs, that we try to give our clients something much more creative and lively to showcase their ideas.”
Arbor started life in 1995 as an importer of Zimbabwean produce, but when its flagship supply source decided to stop exporting, it sold the trading arm of the business to Exotic Farm Produce. “Since at the time I was already building the Bimi brand as Arbor’s head of marketing, we decided to throw all our efforts into offering highly creative marketing and branding services,” says Perry. “We could clearly see what people were not doing in this regard, and felt we could explore that.”
Arbor moved from its Sunninghill premises to its current site in Chiswick in 1999. Four staff - Perry, Hurst, account manager Crispin Marsland-Roberts and project manager James Hurst - work full time from the office, but various part-time employees, who the firm refers to as associates, work from their own bases across the UK and Europe.
“Most of our referrals are word of mouth - after all, you’re only as good as your last campaign,” says Perry. “The fresh produce world is quite a small, close-knit community, and a lot of what we do has high visibility.”
Hurst says: “Some people in the fresh produce industry are more enlightened than others, but more and more are seeing the benefits of a very visual marketing campaign. Arbor is all about giving the brands a soul, a personality, as consumers cannot always differentiate fresh produce and many see it as a commodity. But we want them to see that they do have a choice, and the industry should use companies like us as much as well-known brands like Heinz and Nestlé do. I am a great believer that three seconds in front of a shelf can sell a product - but then you have to get people to repeat purchase.”
Perry agrees. “There is no real great loyalty among the public for which retailer they shop at, so it is becoming increasingly important for suppliers and supermarkets to differentiate their products,” he says. “Everyone is becoming aware that selling on price is a downward spiral, and while retailers may be price conscious, they also want to offer a good shopping experience, as at the end of the day people are aspirational.”
Fresh produce companies may form the bulk of Arbor’s clients, but the firm has also dipped its toes into other sectors, having done some work on behalf of Harvey Nichols for a range of Japanese dipping sauces and for property and landscaping companies, among others. “I am a consultant for the department of business, enterprise and regulatory reform, and as a result Arbor is on their database and occasionally gets called upon to assist companies outside the fresh produce world,” says Perry.
Arbor London’s next move will be to set up representative offices in other countries, since it is already active in Europe and conducts some work on behalf of Loblaws, Canada’s largest retailer. “Having said that, we also want to remain small and creative - we want to control the quality of our output, and most of all not lose our creative edge,” says Hurst.
“We think we are quite unique in the fresh produce industry,” says Perry. “We believe in experiential marketing, meaning that we provide the consumer with an experience they will take away and remember - the Mr Pippy campaign is a clear example of this.
“We like to give our campaigns a memorable personality, and will maintain this sense of individuality even when we have offices in other parts of the world,” he adds.
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