This is the story of how a brand team laid down a much bigger and bolder challenge than is usual in a comms research brief. And how this paid off in terms of immediate, measurable brand benefits, as well as deeper consumer understanding that will shape the team’s thinking for years to come.
Crusty bread with a generous spread of creamy butter. What could be lovelier? Or more boring for advertising!
Lurpak realised this years ago and instead championed the cause of great home cooking in its award winning, global advertising.
But, keeping things fresh and relevant is tough. Tectonic shifts in nutritional understanding, has prompted a range of new food trends. In late 2018 Lurpak and their agency, W+K, kicked off a new round of consumer understanding amongst their Food Lover target. This wasn’t to be the standard snapshot approach to fuel the next ad development. Here they wanted to build a bank of new insights, a rich resource to help guide and create the most cutting edge, relevant communications for the following five years.
So, an exciting mission for us as researchers – but one with significant challenges. We needed to go deep and deliver a layered and nuanced understanding of Food Lovers’ attitudes towards food and cooking and to future proof this as far as possible. The Lurpak team weren’t just looking for raw insights either. They wanted clear direction on how the brand’s ‘Champions of Good Food’ positioning could be brought to life in the most compelling ways. Finally, the insights needed to have universal relevance for a global campaign to work. But whilst good food and nutrition are universal concerns, cooking, cuisines and kitchen habits are culturally specific (leaving aside the very different rules and norms for TV advertising).
In summary: not a research brief for the fainthearted!
Our approach
The research had to go large in scope; mining three key areas, each with multiple dimensions:
Our approach was shaped by a number of considerations:
- Consumers can only tell us part of the story – often lacking clarity on how they’re influenced, or spotting what’s coming over the hill.
- Future-proofing meant looking beyond passing fads or trends. We needed deeper truths; non-obvious but profoundly connected to fundamental and abiding human needs.
- Too often, clients consume research second-hand. To hit home, we wanted client and agency up close and personal; not just hearing about but seeing and feeling Food Lover stories and the associated emotional involvement with cooking
- We knew a repository of vivid material would be an invaluable source of inspiration – an abiding window into the reality of how consumers go about their ‘food lives’ – organise their kitchens, talk about food, value their favourite utensils, and so on.
All this, not just to aid the strategic thinking, but to feed the creatives’ imaginations, helping them execute the strongest possible connections with consumers.
So we deployed an iterative approach, building layer upon layer, each stage feeding the next.
Across UK, Denmark, Sweden, Greece, UAE and KSA we conducted:
- Desk research for foundational understanding of market differences
- A semiotic study, led by Folk’s in-house semiotician, of changing visual and verbal codes in cooking
- Expert interviews with food writers, chefs, and nutritionists exploring emerging influences and trends
- Interviews with communications and cultural experts in MENA to understand differing cultural sensitivities
- At the heart of it all, an ambitious, two-stage, auto-ethnographic exploration with Food Lovers in each market, via an agile and interactive online platform. This explored in an innovative and textured manner the evolving mindset, behaviours and underlying influences surrounding cooking and the role of butter within it
- Finally, in home, consumer ‘Cook-Alongs’ added another level to the understanding of how Food Lovers ‘inhabit’ their kitchens and the world of food.
Client and agency teams had front-line access to the communities to contribute questions and suggestions. They also attended the Cook-Alongs, built around a guided tour of our Food Lover’s kitchen and them cooking up a favourite dish. This provided an especially lively and expansive tableau, delivering an immediate and visceral picture of the target consumer. (Plus, we got a free meal at a socially acceptable time – unusual for us qual researchers!)
The proof is in the pudding
In a nutshell: this project delivered. It gave the team a springboard to create ads which have already led to demonstrable category shifts across the markets. It has supplied them with a step change in closeness to, and appreciation of, their consumer, which will continue to shape brand activity for years to come.
Outputs were fashioned into a clear narrative, using a vivid array of video, visuals and verbatim that gave the findings greater resonance. It was presented via a day long, immersive workshop with a more detailed bank of curated digital output and a ‘Food Love’ film as supplementary leave-behinds.
All very illuminating and stimulating but the real strategic direction emerged from carefully constructed and diligent old-school analysis and detective work. Through this we distilled the key, cross-market trends, mapping these against different stages of the cook’s journey to identify where the most fertile ideas for butter lay. For instance, a new strategic opportunity…
…Lurpak had spent years elevating the importance of good home cooking. Now was the time to elevate the cook.
W+K ran with this idea and ‘Where there are cooks…’ was born.
A number of metrics attest to the ad’s effectiveness – here are just a few to whet the appetite:
In Greece, Lurpak is a challenger, having half the users of market leader Vitam. Post ad launch, spontaneous awareness doubled YoY to 22%. ‘My first choice’ increased by 7% and brand love by 8%. It overtook Vitam in ‘tastes better than other brands’ and ‘better quality’, and ‘has great advertising’ rose over 10%.
In the UK, where Lurpak is the largest brand by volume, YoY figures are also impressive:
- ‘Buy nowadays’ up 5% to 38%
- ‘First Choice’ up 4% to 25%
- Up by 8% to overtake Flora as market leader in brand affinity,
- ‘Uniqueness’ up 8% to 38% (Anchor next closest on 29%)
- ‘Worth paying more for’ up 6% to 37%
Where the ad was pre-tested, KPIs were also well above the market average.
But effectiveness isn’t just about hard data. An equally important measure is how it inspired the people it was conducted for. So we’ll give them the last word:
“…instrumental in making the creative development of our campaign a success. The depth of insight, the variety of responses and the clarity of the analysis meant that we had a wealth of findings to use as inspiration for our creative work: the strategy itself, the creative world and the kitchens we portray. Moreover, the scale and richness of the learnings means this is a body of work that delivers much more than insight for a single campaign – this work will continue to influence the brand and our thinking well into the future.”
Rory Foster, Account Planner, W+K
“A real eye opener, giving us a much more nuanced and 3-D understanding of our consumer, as well as a vivid picture of the key trends and a very clear understanding of how Lurpak could best tap into them. It has already proved a great springboard for effective advertising and is a constant companion in everything else we do with the brand. Like all really useful pieces of research it lives on vividly and is referred to regularly.”
Christian Fischer, Global Vice President Lurpak, Arla.
This article is based on the winning submission for AQR’s 2020 Qualitative Excellence Award.
