Waking the sleep shoppers: A proper effective campaign for Yorkshire Tea

IPA Effectiveness Awards Case Study 2018

Standard black tea is a habitual purchase where brand loyalty is three times the FMCG average, but in this shrinking market Yorkshire Tea needed to win consumers from other brands if it wanted to grow. The ‘Where everything’s done proper’ strategy achieved this, waking up ‘sleep shopping’ tea buyers. Funny TV and online advertising featuring Yorkshire celebrities such as Sir Michael Parkinson and the Brownlees convinced consumers of Yorkshire Tea’s quality. Drinkers switched and both sales and value share surged, making Yorkshire tea Britain’s second favourite tea brand. An estimated £2.81 profit was generated for every £1 invested.

The idea that Yorkshire Tea is ‘A place where everything’s done proper’ isn’t just the title of our creative campaign – it’s an increasingly accurate description of our approach to measuring communications effectiveness. Yorkshire Tea has always enjoyed strong advocacy from its loyal fans, but we’ve now come to recognise that in order to challenge for market leadership we need to substantially grow our customer base – and in a shrinking market that means winning over drinkers of other tea brands. As a result, we are now tasking our agencies with generating and placing communications that can cut through the apathy of Non Drinkers and communicate our quality credentials in a culturally famous way. This in turn has influenced the way we measure success. We task our tracking partner – the Nursery – with regularly assessing whether we’ve engaged non YT drinkers specifically and changed their views about the brand. Our internal analysts are now focused on the key metrics of penetration and value share, constantly examining IRI and Kantar data to make sure we are continuing to win new customers with each new burst of comms. We regularly check pricing and level of promotions to make sure we’re not just buying market share temporarily but creating permanent increases in sales. And finally we conduct annual econometric analysis with ebiquity to help us isolate the effect of communications versus all other variables. The insights about how we can grow our brand gleaned from the ‘Where everything’s done proper’ campaign are well understood within the business – all the way up to senior management – and will continue to help guide our decisions long beyond the lifespan of the initial creative executions. Hopefully three or four years time we’ll be back with another paper about how we have achieved our long-term goal of becoming the market leader!

Dom Dwight, Marketing Director, Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate
Bettys and Taylors of Harrogate