In The News Hovis - A Design Success Story
Creativity Works
by Richard Murray
January 2010
Bravery paid off for British Bakeries when it rejuvenated one of Britain's best known brands with attention-grabbing new packs for Hovis. The designs provided the focal point for PR and advertising campaigns, enabling Hovis to seize back market leadership in brown bread and to storm ahead in new sectors. While Hovis accelerates away from its rivals, British Bakeries finds itself in possession of a proven and distinctive creative concept that begs to be applied to other company products.
The consumer sees Hovis as one of the great staple British brands. It is an image reinforced over decades by the quality of the product, and by its homely advertising, tinged with nostalgia. But British Bakeries' view was somewhat different. Despite being overall brand leader, Hovis's success rested on brown bread, and was not sustainable in the long term. Though sales were up 20% year-onyear, prices were being squeezed, and profits were under threat. 'We wanted to be the number one in the overall bread market, but we were being locked into brown, which was shrinking by 5% a year,' explains Paula Moss, Hovis brands director.
So the challenge was to exploit the existing strength of the brand, based on the healthy image of brown bread, by projecting it in a new, modern way that would carry across into white bread as well, which, unlike brown, was growing at 20%. At the same time, a change would allow Hovis to reassert its popular appeal, shedding both the aloofness which had grown up because of recent advertising and the impression given by similar packs that the brand was no better than its rivals. Brand awareness had fallen from 85% in 1998 to just 64% in May 2001. Hovis needed to come back as 'the bread of choice for ordinary people,' as Moss puts it.
All this change would mean throwing out the nostalgic imagery used for so long to promote Hovis's goodness, but Moss was emboldened to proceed by the example of her managing director's recent comprehensive restructuring of the company. The new marketing strategy was to involve change to every aspect of the communications mix.
Some of the agencies that pitched for the advertising account simply couldnt bring themselves to ditch the nostalgic approach, while another came up with an excellent creative approach, but one which merely put off the day of judgement. BMP won the business because it was not afraid to make the break with the past. 'We realised that whatever we did in communications terms, it was going to have to be very noticeable and very different to get people to think again about Hovis,' says account director Tricia Black. 'We were going to have to "disrupt" their thoughts.'
Research into consumer perceptions showed that people thought they knew all there was to know about Hovis. It was rated 'good at brown' by 38% of consumers, and 'good at white' by only 13%, while for its main rival Kingsmill the figures were more or less reversed. So Moss commissioned designers Williams Murray Hamm and a design company whose website betrays their aim: creatingdifference.com and to come up with packaging that would 'stop them in the aisles' and force them to shed their prejudices. Finally, Borkowski PR, a company more accustomed to handling celebrities than famous brands, was appointed to publicise the relaunch.
The new packs were central and a fact acknowledged by the inclusion of the designs in the 2002 D&AD Annual. Richard Murray, the studio's strategist, admires brands such as Oxo and Marmite which have unique presentation based on a defensible intellectual property in their pack design. Other brands, meanwhile, sometimes even much loved brands, are being 'submerged in parity'. Competitors imitate them, they dare not move on, and so they become increasingly invisible. It's all too common for such brands to avoid anything radical until the slide becomes a crisis and by then it's often too late.
As a basic food commodity, bread brands are perhaps especially prone to this kind of drift. But as a basically strong brand, Hovis would be well able to avoid this trap with a bold move. Established brands are more robust than we think, and consumers can go along with change,' Murray says.
Williams Murray Hamm's plan to revitalise the brand centred not on the bread and which consumers felt they knew, after all but on what you could do with it. The designs use wraparound images of popular sandwich fillings - sliced egg, cucumber and tomato, for example - as a means of coding the variety of the bread, white or brown, thick or thin sliced. Hovis would become the gateway to a variety of possibilities - whatever accompaniment, with whatever bread.
British Bakeries relaunched Hovis in June 2001 with a PR campaign involving some highly unusual techniques for a major brand. The power of the designers' 'big idea' of wrap-around food imagery was successfully demonstrated by dressing actors in bakedbean suits for the occasion. British Bakeries' board directors also wore the suits as they made the first deliveries of the new loaves in a cucumber-sided lorry.
The advertising took a different tack with irreverent cartoon figures serving to banish the memory of the boy pushing his bike up the hill to the strains of Dvorak's 'New World' symphony. In the end, the new packs and the advertising campaign were judged to have contributed equally to Hovis's volume share of the market, winning a Silver IPA Effectiveness Award.
After a few teething troubles due mainly to initial customer and supermarket confusion, Hovis rapidly gained ground over its principal rival. British Bakeries achieved its business objectives for the brand after just two months. By the end of 2001, six months after the launch the retail sales value had shot up by 20% to £175 million, and it was possible for retailers to withdraw their long-term price reductions and increase theirprofits. For the first time in 115 years, Hovis has taken the lead not only in brown bread but also in white, where sales increased by 50%. Sales overall rose by 29%. Hovis was recently tracked as the fastest growing food brand, and its record sales mean that it now accounts for more than 50% of British Bakeries' volume for the first time ever.
The unexpected new look was featured by national news programmes and newspapers and even praised by style magazines. Over 800 consumers wrote in during the month immediately following the launch - ten times the usual rate of response - to praise and damn in equal measure, and the letters are still coming. (Usually a pack change provokes a largely critical trickle which soon tails off.)
The solution worked well on a number of levels. Seen on supermarket shelves, the colourful packs instantly communicate the idea of 'variety' thought central to Hovis's future. Once the consumer has learned which food wraps their favourite bread, it becomes easier than ever to find the loaf they want. Both qualitative and quantitative research confirmed the humorous appeal of the new packs. Unusually for such surveys, some of the new designs even outscored the familiar old packs.
Most important was that, for all their apparent eccentricity, the designs clearly reflected the desired repositioning of the brand. 'You can really be very brave and bold if your thinking is clear and robust,' says Moss. 'You can really push an idea as far as it will go.' Furthermore, both designer and client feel the basic idea has the potential to endure - and to be extended (as Borkowski's PR suits already show).
British Bakeries now owns an entertaining piece of intellectual property that is easily protected and has the versatility to be put to use on further company products. For others, there is the lesson as clear as could be that a time-honoured brand need not fear major a creative change - provided it is made for solid strategic reasons. As Richard Murray says: 'Hovis has disproved the theory that big brands can only move forward in small stages.'