Chippy tea: Adam & Eve lands IPA top prize for McCain

mccain chipsAdam & Eve DDB has scooped one of the industry’s top awards, landing the IPA Effectiveness Awards grand prix for not only rebuilding the McCain brand but using advertising to generate £79m of incremental gross profits while total company gross profits rose by 32%.

The award-winning entry details how the agency overhauled the McCain brand over a nine year period by celebrating the joyful reality of family teatime, which delivered a 56% increase in sales value and a profit ROI of £1.48 per £1 invested in a challenging market.

In addition to the grand prix, the McCain submission won The Channon Prize for Best New Learning and a gold award, while Adam & Eve DDB was named Effectiveness Company of the Year.

As consumers recovered from the 2008 global economic crash, their purchasing habits changed. Discretionary thrift, with people looking to save money even if they weren’t feeling the pinch themselves, saw own label frozen chips – McCain’s main competitor – account for half of all frozen chips sold in the UK by 2015.

Meanwhile, consumers were searching for ‘oven chips’ rather than ‘McCain’. This, combined with the rise of discount supermarkets like Lidl and Aldi, where McCain did not distribute its products, meant that the McCain business was struggling. After initially increasing the depth and frequency of promotions to entice customers, by early 2015 revenues had started to fall.

Adam & Eve DDB developed a new strategy and objectives focusing on long-term brand building to grow sales profitably in a time of raging inflation, changing shopper behaviour and a cost of living crisis.

By reducing the brand’s price elasticity – the degree to which its sales respond to price changes – and building up the brand so that McCain could maintain its price premium as it grew sales volumes, the strategy increased McCain’s net profits by £26m over the period of the case.

Conversations with parents helped McCain discover that advertising and the media were showcasing ‘fake, unrelatable perfection’ that was nothing like the ‘messy, loveable and recognisable reality’ of their actual lives. This created an opportunity to start reflecting the joyful lived experience and diversity of British family teatimes, and make real British families feel seen, heard and celebrated.

McCain’s new brand world came to life in 2015, featuring emotive vignettes of real families at teatime, and how it brings them together, alongside a new brand voice in actor Ricky Tomlinson. This direct effort to showcase and celebrate modern Britain marked one of the first times the real unpolished spectrum of British life was shown, and celebrated, in advertising.

Meanwhile, the media strategy developed by PHD followed Binet and Field’s 60:40 brand-activation split, upweighting brand advertising to deliver on emotion. With an increasing portion of budget invested in VOD in line with shifting viewing behaviour, targeting was skewed towards mums who are disproportionately the primary shopper in families and McCain’s largest customer group.

The impact on McCain’s brand was profound. People became more aware of McCain’s advertising, brand associations improved significantly, and people felt more positively about McCain as each campaign built on the last to create the equivalent of marketing compound interest.

As a result, price elasticity fell by 47% and consideration of the brand across all buyers improved by 37% between 2015 and 2023. Searches for ‘McCain’ also caught and eventually overtook ‘oven chips’, helping reverse the commoditisation of the category.

Over the course of nine years, Adam & Eve DDB’s new marketing strategy delivered a profit ROI of £1.48 per £1 invested, strengthened the McCain brand across the board, shifted real buying behaviour and improved McCain’s resiliency for future crises.

In addition, advertising added an extra 5% in sales volumes between 2015 and 2023, including delivering incremental sales even when the brand experienced a significant sales spike in the Covid-19 period.

Meanwhile, the average price paid for the brand’s products rose by 48% per kg, helping counter the inflation in its overheads.

Nationwide chief customer officer Catherine Kehoe, who was chair of judges, said: “Congratulations to Adam & Eve DDB. Charting the story of McCain through the cost-of-living crisis, it deals with some of the biggest challenges in marketing, from managing a brand in a downturn, shoring up goodwill in the face of growing own-label competition, and delivering a business-transforming impact through shifts in price elasticity.

“A bold decision to support the brand rather than default to price promotions really paid off. If ever there was a paper to take to the CFO to justify investment in advertising, this is it.”

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