The Breakfast Club

Have you ever made a decision to buy a product purely on the strength of an advertisement campaign?

The answer may not be entirely clear as most publicity can be creeping and subversive.

I have often found myself whistling, humming or singing a tune before the realisation that it comes from a thirty second advertisement seen on tv or heard on the radio. That can be a bit embarrassing if the melody comes from the soundtrack selling a female sanitary product, a laxative or something else from the medical field.

Some adverts can be completely off-putting in terms of thinking about a purchase.

One current UK campaign is to depict old ladies, lovely as they are, knitting a cereal, the good old standard on the breakfast tables of New Zealanders, Canadians and the British known to all as Shreddies.

They are very familiar having been around for around 70 years.

Everyone can describe Shreddies in its rather unique multi layered grid type fabrication of wholegrain wheat in a regular square shape.

To last for multiple decades suggests a good trusted product and a loyal customer base but in 2008 the the global Kraft Foods commissioned their usual advertising company to reintroduce Shreddies as a leading brand in the very competitive breakfast cereal sector.

The brief for Ogilvy Mather was to work on a campaign but keeping very much to the forefront of their minds that Shreddies customers liked them just the way they were and had always been.

The saying, "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" seems so apt in this scenario.

How is it possible to add value to a product without changing its intrinsic character which is its strongest and most unique selling point?

The answer was pure genius.

The iconic square Shreddie was simply rotated by forty five degrees to transform the square to a triangular profile and calling the "new" product a "Diamond Shreddie".

In the usual market research and focus group sessions amongst members of the public there seemed to be some initial confusion but when faced with a diamond orientated shape rather than a regular square there were definite claims of  a better taste, a crunchier texture and more flavour.

Remember  that all of this was done without changing Shreddies in design, formulation, size or in any other way.

In other market studies this added value perception proved strong, for example the more expensive a wine, the more it was appreciated even though the quality did not at all justify the price tag.

For Kraft Foods the upscaling to actual production of "All New Diamond Shreddies" saw an immediate 18% upsurge in sales and this was sustained for months afterwards.

Conservative factions in Canada resented the perceived death of the square Shreddie and so Kraft Foods cleverly brought out packaging under the Combo theme with a packaged mixture, 50/50 of both original and new versions.

The marketing did not stop there. The debate raged on and Ogilvy and Mather capitalised on this by creating a supposed video message from a fictional President of Shreddies in which he answers a letter from a consumer disgruntled over how much was paid to the person who produced the thing.

The technique used, visual targeting, proved its worth for Shreddies and who knows we may , as shoppers, have fallen prey to its application in many other aspects of our everyday consumer requirements.