INTERVIEW: When Loretta Dignam took on marketing at Jacob Fruitfield she set about losing the products' reputation as 'granny biscuits'
WHEN LORETTA Dignam joined Jacob Fruitfield as marketing director, she inherited a portfolio of “granny biscuits” and faded glories with falling sales. Some red spandex and heavy-duty corsetry later and sales of Jacob’s key brands are growing again – now there’s only the Government VAT increase to take the gloss off Christmas tin sales.
Dignam, who recently won Marketer of the Year 2011, has been busy working on re-costing Jacob Fruitfield’s plans for 2012 in light of the 2 per cent increase in the standard VAT rate. “We had put our 2012 budget to bed,” she says. The increase throws up a marketing dilemma for a company whose goods are price-sensitive. “We might have packets at €1.99, and that would be flashed on the pack,” says Dignam. Jacob’s now has to decide whether it can afford to go above that price: or afford not to.
“It’s not welcome. It’s not good, but such is life,” says Dignam, who first joined Jacob’s in 2009, initially on a six-month maternity contract. At the time, Jacob’s best-known brands were losing share and sales.
“The brands were not in great shape, to be honest. The Fig Rolls were seen as a granny biscuit, the Kimberley, Mikado and Coconut Creams were seen as a brand you might take out when your sister came round, but not when your sister-in-law came round.”
Yet the entire Jacob Fruitfield portfolio was still the top biscuit brand in Ireland, having been around since 1851. But there were 20 sub-brands in the portfolio and not enough resources in the marketing budget to support them all.
Dignam decided to focus on the four pillar brands of Fig Rolls, Mallows (Kimberley, Mikado, Coconut Creams), Elite and Cream Crackers, taking a staggered approach to avoid one major hit on spend. She began by jettisoning from Fig Rolls’ above-the-line advertising the tagline “how do Jacob’s get the figs into Fig Rolls”, after a round of focus-grouping confirmed it had grown dusty.
“They basically told us that was a rhetorical question and why couldn’t we tell them something new,” says Dignam.
Out of the process came the idea for Taste Buds, which involved the filming of men and women dressed in red spandex bodysuits as they “assaulted” celebrities on Grafton Street. Combined with a related series of TV ads created by the agency DDFHB and a series of in-store promotions, a 14 per cent year-on-year decline in Fig Roll sales was reversed into a 5 per cent year-on-year climb.
Next on the hit list was the Mallows range. "We revamped the jingle to make it 21st century, for the X Factoraudience," she says. "The idea was that people have eating rituals with the Mallows range, so the theme was to make them playfully soft."
This led to the hiring of three models who would be dubbed Kim, Mika and Coco, “the personification of those biscuits”, and a TV ad in the style of a Katy Perry music video that was memorable and is perhaps best described as, well, brash.
“We did have some complaints saying the ad was pornographic,” says Dignam. Prior to its release, however, the ad was tested on Mallows’ “loyal following of over 35s” to a mostly positive reception.
“We didn’t want to lose our loyalists, but they recognised that we had to modernise it,” says Dignam. “This brand was in even worse shape than Fig Rolls. It had been in a five-year decline of about 18-20 per cent.”
And while sexed-up biscuits might not be everyone’s cup of tea, the campaign did the trick. Sales of Mallows are up about 7 per cent in the year to date.
Over the past year, Dignam has also devoted energy to launching a chocolate-covered Mikado under the Elite brand and taken Jacob's into the cereal bar space. The Why Not cereal bar range, launched in September, was targeted at women via sample marketing in Imagemagazine and advertising on a UniSlim app.
Making a chocolate-covered cereal bar for under 100 calories is “like making a beer that doesn’t give you a hangover”, she says. But it won’t be until diet-frenzy January that Jacob’s really knows if Why Not is working.
But the social media age has many advantages for marketers, not least getting immediate feedback from consumers. “You get to find out very fast if a campaign has traction.”
