If Willy Wonka had a Facebook page...

Thanks to the social web, you can now share anything with anyone anywhere in the world. The trend toward shared experiences online is being replicated offline and its impact can be felt in how we are choosing to eat. The rise of the ‘big night in’ has also placed greater emphasis on the need to provide products to capitalise on the desire to share.  This has given birth to a phenomenon of sharing which has been driving success and innovation in the confectionary category. Out-of-home snacking has dropped by almost 16% over the past 12 months. Kantar usage data shows in-home confectionery occasions are growing 3.4% year-on-year driven by in-home snacking – up 6.2%.

It’s an area in which chocolate brands are faring particularly well with value sales of sharing bags up 9.6% and volume up 8.3%. The sharing of ideas, opinions, media and status updates are all part of what makes social media a powerful force, and this is especially relevant for brands. Adding sharing options to content in online media can lead to more page views and better status in search results.

And with its sponsorship of London 2012 next year Cadbury has perhaps the biggest opportunity to capitalise on the spirit of sharing. In September Cadbury launched an £8m Keep Team GB Pumped campaign inviting consumers to record motivational power training songs via a webcam and share them online. Their Spots & Stripes campaign has also sought to encourage consumers to get involved in competition with their peers and communities. We’ll be watching with interest to see their next move as the games approach. 

The reader of the (crisp) pack

We all know how important the description on the packet is when it comes to food. At Phipps we’ve been crunching our way through a hell of a lot of crisps lately, all in the name of research of course, to get under the skin of what drives consumer purchasing in this category. It appears semantics have never been so important when it comes to making that decision on which bag to pick up. It comes as no surprise to us food and wine PRs that descriptions are so important when selling food, as for us the language we use on a daily basis is vital in getting across key messages to the media for our clients.

Our research shows that the language used on crisp packets makes a huge difference in how consumers perceive the brand. We quizzed one hundred people, asking them to select which crisp description would make them want to purchase a bag of crisps the most. A whopping 47% of people picked the winning description ‘Full on Flavour: made from the finest ingredients. 100% natural flavour crisps’. Given that flavour and taste came up as the key motivator in crisp purchasing, we found that those descriptions not referencing flavour and provenance fell foul with our respondents.

Alongside our crisp survey we ran two in-depth focus groups. Our groups of boys and girls (aged 18-55) also showed that neither gender seem to care for health and nutrition labelling on packaging when buying sharing bags of crisps. The general consensus being that in a social occasion you are less worried about calories and salt content. Nearly all of our focus group respondents looked at labelling on 30g bags of crisps however, allowing this information to affect their purchasing decisions. With the government pushing for more nutritional information on food packs, it will be interesting to see if crisp manufacturers bring traffic light labelling to the front of sharing bags of crisps in the future.

For PRs language is our toolbox and selecting which tools to use can be the difference between a successful PR campaign and one that falls on deaf ears. No doubt the annual festival ‘Rioja Tapas Fantasticas’ which we run for Wines from Rioja wouldn’t have proved quite so successful had we named it ‘The London Tapas Festival’. Whilst consumers respond to one set of language, what can appeal to media may be quite different. Call it spin doctoring if you must, but effective PR is an art form few brands can afford to do without. 

Posted by Rachael Everitt

I don’t drink coffee, I take tea my dear…

No one summed up the English’s love affair with tea better than Sting. But most Brits would be hard pushed to know where their beloved brew is actually coming from. Which is where we come in. Earlier this month the Phipps office was celebrating with, er, a lovely cup of tea after winning a six-way pitch organised by the PRCA/ FAPRA to work with the Tea Board of Kenya. Kenyan tea is one of the world’s most drunk teas and is in almost all of the UK’s best-loved blends but it also has a lot to shout about it its own right. We’re implementing a campaign including social media, consumer and stakeholder communications to help Kenyan tea get the credit it deserves. So watch this space for all things tea-related and in the meantime, pass the sugar! 

Posted by Lynne Shirley 

The Great British Beer Blog

British ale has undergone somewhat of a renaissance of late. Bottled ales are cropping up on supermarket shelves and, assisted by a generous duty relief for producers of less than 3,000 barrels a year, microbreweries are cropping up all over the place. The big trend for provenance and authenticity are being cited as main reasons and industry experts are predicting a further 50 new small breweries opening around the country this year. 

Conversely, the UK beer market has shrank by 7% last year and we're losing 25 pubs a week. On the other hand, Phipps client Sainsbury’s, has seen a 7% year-on-year growth in bottled beers this year. Capitalising on a renewed consumer appetite for real ales, Sainsbury’s earlier this year also launched a nationwide competition to find Britain’s best independently produced beer. ‘The Great British Beer Hunt’ drew entries from all over the country by brewers experimenting with new styles and reviving old ones all eager to get their beers out to a wider market.

Phipps is of course well known for its work in the wine industry but on working with Sainsbury’s on the Great British Beer Hunt we’ve discovered that beer is every bit as complex as wine and the wide array of media that have covered the event seem to agree.

Posted by Becky Erwood

Inflation and the future of food PR

Last week’s figures on inflation from the Office of National Statistics (ONS) show that food prices have risen 5.2% year-on-year. In real terms food is now more expensive than any time since 1984. Not surprisingly, discount retailers have seen a marked increase in business as consumers are replacing familiar (and much-loved) household brands with value ranges or no-name products. So are we seeing a race to the bottom when it comes to food prices and if so, what does that mean for food PR? While it’s certainly true that the era of cheap food is over, trading down to cheaper alternatives is only one side of the story. How else could you explain the simultaneous rise in profits for more upmarket food retailers? What is often overlooked in this admittedly confusing picture of consumer spending habits is that brand marketing itself is undergoing a fundamental change. Brands have evolved from something we buy, trust, want, prefer and love to something we actively participate in. Whether it’s through sampling opportunities or social media, engaged brands are valued 18% higher, according to the Interbrand Top Global Brand Report. The lesson for brand managers? The ‘build the brand and they will come’ mantra is fast becoming a thing of the past. Instead, walk, run, go and listen to your consumers. Talk to them (not at them) and secure their loyalty. In other words, think less about campaigns and more about conversations. 

Posted by Toby Schuster

What Circulation Figures Say About Us

When The Guardian published the latest list of the Top 100 paid-for magazines we at Phipps couldn’t help drawing some conclusions on how these figures reflect the social trends of the year and consumers and their buying habits.

Forget House Beautiful, think House Maintenance

The rise in the circulation of Good Housekeeping (up 1.9%) and BBC Gardeners World (up 3.3%) suggests we’re keeping our houses clean and fingers green. The recession and stamp duty has forced home owners to stay put, and invest in their current home rather than putting the For Sale sign up. We’re less concerned with making our house look ready for buyers and more concerned with house maintenance and adding actual value to our homes while riding out the economic storm.

Nation of Economists

We know that in a recession the public pays more attention to the economy. This is certainly supported by The Economist’s circulation figure (up 6.4%) and The Week (up 3.2%), satisfying our need to understand what’s going on around us and making us better informed. It also explains why trashy celeb mags are on their way out. Heat magazine’s circulation figure is down a whopping 21.8% and while we could argue that the typical Heat reader has grown out of the mag, we also think that the fall in circulation figures of other celeb based weeklies such as New, Closer and Star show we’re less bothered about reaching into our recession-battled pockets to splash out on the latest z-list gossip.

TV event of the decade

The Kate Middleton wedding (who cared what Prince William was wearing?) led to a huge 26.8% increase in Hello!’s circulation. Having been the biggest TV event in history it’s not totally surprising that TV guides are on their way up. TV Choice topped the Top 100 list with a circulation of just under 1.5 million (up 3.5% year on year). What’s on TV follows as a close second, with an even higher year-on-year increase of circulation at 5.4% and Total TV Guide has a rise in circ of 7.7%. With less disposable income, this year was definitely the year for TV and we wonder if the Royal Wedding has catapulted us into a nation of couch potatoes.

Posted by Rachael Everitt

Fickle, cynical and vocal…welcome to Gen Y and the world of youth marketing

Today’s 16-24 year olds are a hard (but not impossible) to reach audience. Yes, they are fickle and extremely marketing-savvy but also a brand’s ideal customer thanks to their disposable income, brand loyalty and unprecedented ability to digitally spread your word. The decline of traditional media and advertising as marketing channels mean that knowing how to reach this audience has become the Holy Grail of PR. Especially when it comes to food and drink they are equally swayed by both various social media platforms such as Tumblr or Facebook and their parents (Faith Popcorn called their tendency to inherit their parents’ brand preferences ‘Brand-Me-Down’ way back in 2003). One thing is worth noting however – they rarely produce the content they so like to share. And this is where food and drink brands have a tremendous opportunity to connect. It’s precisely how the Forbes Magazine blog recently described the key to successful youth marketing but, maybe counterintuitive to this insight, is our belief that in today’s digital world 16-24 year olds also long for real experiences with real people. What does this mean for PR or brand managers? To find out follow the link to Phipps’s presentation on Gen Y…Where Are You?

Posted by Toby Schuster