The Re:fresh award-winning lovefruit campaign has not only added a splash of colour to these pages on a number of occasions, but, more importantly, brightened up motorways across southern England, emblazoned with pride on the haulage fleet of JP Fruit.
Together with its familiar green and yellow logo, the company’s designs exploit the appeal of cute fruit-based characters and images in encouraging onlookers to take on-board the government’s 5 A DAY message.
The brains behind the marketing ploy, JP Fruit’s group marketing manager, Dickon Poole, says the idea came to him while on a company “away-day” a few years ago. “I was trying to find a corporate strategy which encompassed how we felt about our business and how we felt about the industry and translate that into a communication message,” Poole recalls.
As with all the best creations, nothing happened immediately, but then a couple of years ago David Maynard joined JP as managing director and put the wheels of corporate unification in motion, starting with the lorries.
“David said we needed to get something on our lorries to make them a little smarter and lovefruit seemed to encompass everything we did,” says Poole. “We work with fruit all day long and have a reasonable range to offer. So, we tried it out on a couple of lorries. All the drivers were a bit embarrassed first of all but they all started getting some really positive feedback.”
To come up with a suitable strapline for the design, Poole latched on to a simple message, which captured the company’s mission: “delivering fresh fruit daily”. It was also around this time that the department of health’s 5 A DAY campaign was starting to take off and as a committed participant of the School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme already, the company was keen to capitalise on the increasing hype surrounding healthy eating. The result was the “have you had your 5 A DAY?” slogan now seen accompanied by tasty-looking fruit on several lorries, as well as on all of the company’s marketing paraphernalia and communications, uniting the company on both an internal and external footing, Poole explains: “Whenever I talk to new customers and growers, I tell them this is our mission statement. We feel passionate about our business; this is what we do and it’s great fun.”
According to Poole, getting permission to use the DoH’s logo on the lorries was easy. “You have to pay a small license fee but and then you can use it on everything, so we thought ‘why not?’,” he says. “We were enthusiastic to increase the consumption of fruit and the DoH was over the moon about that.” Of course, the rewards of such endeavours extend beyond the health of the nation, Poole readily admits: “If you are encouraging people to eat more fruit the whole industry will benefit and JP Fruit can enjoy its part of that.”
Since the first lorry took to the road around two-years ago, the company has experimented with various design approaches, with 14 different lines currently on the go, and another eight to 10 in the pipeline. “You have to keep it interesting, like the Nescafé adverts, where they left people always wanting more,” Poole suggests.
One idea the company had was to orchestrate designs to push individual items. The first of these was bananas, which featured a cartoon-style Bananergy sign exploding out of a bunch of bananas and the words “Bananas - the energy snack”.
Another development has been the introduction of colourful fruity characters, accompanied by abbreviated “text speak”, such as “hav u had ur 5 A DAY?”.
In response to Maynard’s request for more “exciting” designs, Poole is working on a rota system for the lorries. “You spend ages working on something and then get bored and change it, so we decided to have a number of lorries and change the images every three or four months,” he explains.
The latest lovefruit designs follow seasonal themes. The idea is keep the JP Fruit logo and alter the imagery around it periodically throughout the year. The first theme, which will be featured on four lorries from April to July this year, highlights the fun of exercising as summer approaches. Active fruit characters are shown alongside the strapline, “Spring into summer with 5 A DAY”. Next up, to herald the start of the UK apple and pear season in August, in which JP Fruit is heavily involved, the lorries will show the British flag with an appropriate message in tow. Then, as winter approaches, the design will switch to cartoon fruits frolicking in the snow, with the message, “Chase your blues away with 5 A DAY”.
Poole and the creative team he employs at design agency, Cognoscenti Communications, have also been toying with possible catchphrases for the forthcoming Olympics, scheduled to be held in London in 2012. The rules about what Olympic-related terminology non-official bodies can use are fairly stringent but Poole hopes something like “Go bananas for London” might be acceptable. As a keen oarsman himself, he is also looking to associate the company with up-and-coming champion rower, Andy Hodge in some kind of promotional campaign.
Trying to gauge the success of a marketing initiative is not easy but Poole is confident that consumers and employees alike respond well to the corporate communication strategy and winning the Re:fresh award for 5 A DAY sponsorship was a very welcome testament to their efforts, he says. “We have done something which no-one else has done as far as I know and so it was a great achievement to be recognised for that.”
JP Fruit now uses “Winner of the 5 A DAY Supporter of the Year award” as a signature on company emails as well as on its mugs. Poole is also keen to get the company’s 5 A DAY slogan onto its fruit boxes but realises its effect would be compromised by the fact supermarkets tend to decant fruit in-store.
Poole’s work has been recognised over at the company’s headquarters in Jamaica where the managing director has asked him to develop the slogan as part of an overall corporate message. The format has already been used by a subsidiary of the business, The Serious Food Company, in Wales, which features the catchphrase, “Lovejuice - delivering your fruit in a bottle”.
Along with keeping the imagery fresh, Poole and his marketing team-mates, Lucy Bland and Kate Rogers, can often be found at local schools and charity events, proudly displaying the company’s slogan on banners, providing fun fruit facts or handing out fruit and other goodies. Members of the company have also been known to subject themselves to barrages of abuse from small children by donning a suitably protective banana costume.
Poole’s marketing prowess has clearly not gone unnoticed in the industry at large either, since he was recently appointed as a member of the board for the forthcoming Eat in Colour campaign - championed by the FPC.
So, what does he make of mass marketing and will he be able to replicate his success on a larger scale? Only time will tell, but Poole believes now is definitely the time for action. “Healthy eating messages are all around at the moment and it’s a great time to be in the business of fruit so it is up to the industry to grasp the opportunity that has come along,” he says. “In the past similar attempts have failed for various reasons but the potential is there this time and I hope we can make it work.”
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