Premier Foods is the UK’s largest food producer, with a portfolio of such iconic brands as Bisto, Campbell’s, Hartley’s, Hovis, Kipling and many, many more. In 2007, the company acquired Rank Hovis McDougal, and with it, Northern Ireland’s longest established bread brand, Ormo.
What did our client need to achieve?
At the time Premier acquired the Ormo brand, independently conducted research fieldwork revealed a number of challenges to the brand: these included, the physical closure of Ormo’s iconic bakery, low recall of packaging, low levels of product listings in major retailers, and the abundance of offerings from other brand owners and own label were dictating that any local proposition must be of the highest international standards.
How did we help them achieve it?
Our research showed particularly strong positive associations for Ormo with ‘morning goods’ and ‘small breads’, such as pancakes, soda bread, potato bread, wheaten, and fruit loaves. This insight provided the cornerstone for our strategic thought which resulted in two core copy elements – Simply Enjoy and Belfast Bred– which, together, articulated a distinctive Ormo proposition across both packaging and advertising solutions.
We took the client’s message to market through TV, outdoor, on-pack promotion, and radio. Digital touch-points included the development of a yourormo.com website, the use of high-traffic websites, outbound online and Search Engine Optimisation strategies, and informed Audience Data Capture.
How do we know it worked?
The most obvious quantitative measure of this campaign’s success came when Ormo pancakes became the biggest selling pancake in Northern Ireland in the period since the campaign launch – a success that resulted in prominent listings in Tesco.
The icing on the cake came when the Ulster Grocer – the definitive voice of the food retailing industry here – awarded the Belfast Bred re-launch as their Marketing Campaign of the Year in 2009.
