Success in a declining market
Last week the Soil Association announced that sales of organic products have been in decline since 2009. You could be forgiven for assuming that this reflects our depressed economy and tightening household budgets. Certainly there is evidence of some consumer ‘trading down’ in the grocery sector in particular, but there are also some trend buckers worthy of note.
Yeo Valley Organic is a great recent example. Just one year on from its TV debut, it features as a best practice case study in the Handbook of Organic and Fair Trade Food Marketing (Leatherhead Food Research). Yeo Valley’s challenge was to broaden its audience appeal while ensuring resonance with its core ethos. Its inspired integrated approach to the market and marketing challenges reaped massive rewards, and using a mix of TV adverting and social media, the brand rapped its way to a 14.9% increase in sales.
Green & Black’s combination of ethical and luxury marketing, pitching the brand above the palate of chocolate-light-weights and children, and Waitrose’s marketing of Duchy Originals using Heston Blumenthal to deliver organic, sustainable, British messages, are other examples of organic marketing cut-through.
Across the sector, organic health & beauty and textiles have shown remarkable recent growth, according to the Soil Association. In textiles, our home-grown, fresh faced Harry-Potterette, Emma Watson, must be credited with the success of People Tree, with her quintessentially British, clean living youth appeal, marketed across traditional and social media, to drive a growing Facebook and Twitter following.
So, if these brands can achieve growth in a ‘depressed’ and declining market then surely there’s more scope for the whole category?