Martin Croft explores the latest Kingsmill Wallace & Gromit campaign, created by GHMC

The bread aisles of the UK’s supermarkets have for the last few years been the setting for a drawn out price war, with one brand or another, seemingly, always on a discount.

But Allied Bakeries’ Kingsmill brand is bucking against that trend right now, with a value-added promotion involving a series of Wallace & Gromit collectible items which consumers can get by trading in tokens from packs of almost all items in the range. In total, the tokens, and the promotion, are appearing on 60 million Kingsmill packs.

This isn’t the first time Kingsmill has linked up with Aardman Animation’s hugely popular characters – it did so in 2009 for a similar promotion linked to the launch of the film, A Matter of Loaf and Death, where the animated duo appeared, aptly, as bakers.

But Kingsmill then deserted the pair for its next major on-pack promotion, linking up instead to the 2010 series of Britain’s Got Talent, with a competition to win show tickets and a range of merchandise to collect. The fact that Kinsgmill then decided to go back to Wallace & Gromit suggests that Britain’s Got Talent wasn’t talented enough when it came to selling bread.

The brief and the pitch

Denise Barrett, senior brand manager at Kingsmill, says: “We wanted to drive and reward loyalty. It’s a way to stand out from price promotions.”

Kingsmill had already decided it wanted to do another campaign linked to the Aardman characters: the question was which agency to use.

The first Wallace & Gromit campaign had been a huge success. It was created for Kingsmill by promotional marketing agency GHMC (under its old name, Geoff Howe Marketing Communications). GHMC was invited to pitch for the latest campaign, and, as Ed Hughes, the agency’s managing director, says, it took the whole pitch process very seriously indeed.

Hughes observes: “We went to some of the consumers who had responded to the first Wallace & Gromit promotion to ask what their experiences had been and what they wanted from a new Kingsmill promo. The first question we asked was whether they think there is a natural affinity between Kingsmill and Wallace & Gromit – the answer was a resounding ‘yes’.”

GHMC incorporated its consumer research into its pitch, which it presented as if it were the designs for one of Wallace’s wacky inventions, complete with a voiceover done by a Wallace sound-alike. The agency got the job – as Denise Barrett says, “GHMC got it right pretty much the first time. They know our brand. They absolutely hit the nail on the head.”

Developing the campaign

Before the first Kingsmill Wallace & Gromit campaign, the bread brand had shied away from running any value-added on-pack promotions for some six years. Its last excursion into on-pack appears to have been its £15m ‘Free Kit for Clubs’ campaign in 2003, where consumers could collect tokens from packs and trade them in for sports equipment for school, college and other sports clubs.

That promotion seems not to have been a particular success, perhaps because of the large number of tokens needed to claim any of the items on offer. Certainly Hughes believes that it was the success of the 2009 Wallace & Gromit campaign that rekindled Kingsmill’s interest in on-pack offers. He says: “It resulted in a significant uplift for the brand over the eight week period.”

That first Wallace & Gromit campaign had effectively fallen into the brand’s lap. Aardman was actively looking for a manufacturer that might be interested in linking up with the characters and in particular with the new film. Kingsmill took up the offer, resulting in two different promotions.

The first was an on-pack and online competition offering ‘Prizes of a Loaftime’, including tickets to a VIP screening of A Matter of Loaf and Death, home entertainment systems and family trips to the Wallace and Gromit experience at the London Science Museum.

The second was the GHMC created token collecting scheme with the bespoke promotional items, in particular the Turbomatic Toastrack, a windup model of the characters’ bakers van which could be used to deliver toast from one end of the breakfast table to the other.

Hughes says: “Wallace & Gromit crosses age brackets and has such a wide appeal. Grandparents can collect for grandkids; mums can buy the products on the weekly shop; kids can collect for themselves.”

Obviously, the second Wallace & Gromit campaign had to deliver more of the same, on the one hand, but something new on the other. The solution was to commission a new set of unique collectible items.

It needed to be similar to the first campaign because the retailers had been impressed with that one’s performance. As Hughes points out, Kingsmill could rely on “high levels of support from trade partners because of the strength of the first promotion. That meant they could reduce the discount and allowed the brand to promote on a level other than price.”

It needed to be different because no-one thought there was any real mileage in an exact repeat of the first promotion. So once GHMC had won the business, it set up a pitch for sourcing the actual promotional products themselves, which was won by a company called Pepagon.

The three items which GHMC had decided on were the Rapide O-Matic Preserves Dispenser, a friction-drive toy motorbike and sidecar with a jam pot in the sidecar; the Lunch-O-Safe Lunchbox, with a combination lock, and the Egg & Soldier Holders, eggcups in the shape of Wallace and Gromit’s heads with containers for toast fingers.

Pepagon helped with the initial designs, created the moulds, got the products made in China and organised shipping. Quality control was vital, Hughes stresses: Aardman insisted on it, the client demanded it and consumers would not be satisfied with anything inferior. “Every single item was checked as it came off the production line. Everything was tested to the nth degree, above and beyond the levels required, and of course everything had to be food grade. Pepagon did a great job.”

The experience of the previous collectibles campaign helped drive the new one. Fixed fee specialist company Mando was brought on board to reduce risk, and advised that order levels for two of the three products needed to be increased. Mando also did the handling and fulfilment on the promotion.

The first promotion had had some issues with higher levels of redemption than expected for the ‘star’ item, the wind up toast rack, so Mando increased numbers of the equivalent item (the friction drive motorcycle and sidecar jam holder and delivery system).

There were nine different redemption scenarios, says Chris Baldwin of Mando. “It’s not just a case of how many people collect, but what they will collect and at what level, with three different gifts and three different levels, ranging from sending in more tokens and a small postage amount to get the items free to collecting fewer tokens and paying a larger contribution.”

The primary channel for consumer contact and administration was a content-rich interactive online promotional hub. There was no above-the-line advertising support for the promotion, other than in supermarket in-store magazines. In addition, there was shopper marketing activity, PR and online, as well, of course, as the promotion appearing on 60 million Kingsmill packs.

There is also a ‘viral’ element, with consumers entered into a competition to win signed Wallace & Gromit invention blueprints if they email details of the token collect scheme to their friends.

Results

Unsurprisingly, Kingsmill is not disclosing figures for the current campaign, but Denise Barrett does say: “The promotion is running very well for us. It’s still in store, so we can’t release any exact figures – but I can say that the campaign is tracking above the first Wallace & Gromit, although there’s still a while to go.”

She believes that the success of the latest Wallace & Gromit activity boils down to the fact that “it’s all about family mealtimes. We were targeting mums with a strong appeal that revolved around an upbeat, modern view of family life. Plus, in a recession, it’s nice to be able to offer something that’s a lot of fun.”