Five Things We Learned About… McCain and adam&eveDDB’s Emotional Brand Building Success

Frozen potato company McCain has been on a business turnaround mission for the last decade, working alongside creative agency partner adam&eveDDB to discover a brand-building strategy that would drive the global company forward. As usual, the agency used its expert credentials to emotionally engage consumers. This, and their long-standing collaboration, has been crucial to their recent success.

The brand was working against macroeconomic challenges in the UK, including the cost-of-living crisis and consumers buying more own-label chips and turning to discount stores where McCain was not being sold. This meant McCain had been taking short-term pricing measures to try and overcome the pressures it subsequently faced.

Among its problems it found that people were also not searching for the McCain brand when shopping online, instead seeking out ‘oven chips’.

In a change of tack, it looked to take a more long-term approach to rediscover success and grow revenue and profits.

Faced with several challenges, McCain had two options to implement a short-term fix; either becoming more aggressive on price promotion which could impact profits, or invest in the brand long-term, which meant lessening the frequency of promotions to brand build and ultimately increase profitability.

The subsequent advertising strategy would focus less on price reduction promotions and more on long-term emotional brand-building and telling the truth about family mealtimes through McCain’s brand communications.

Over nine years, the advertising strategy worked to reduce price elasticity by 47 per cent, which helped raise base sales by 44 per cent without an increase in product distribution.

Mark Hodge, VP of marketing for McCain, describes it as a global business "that has demonstrated in objective terms the power of long-term brand building.”

He continues: “At the core of this success story is the mindset shift to see brands as being built over years and decades, not quarters. This testament to long-term thinking is something that is now encouraged across markets as well as upheld in our own.”

Hodge also underlined the long-standing relationship and development of trust and commitment with adam&eveDDB to achieve the success of the campaign.

“We had to be disciplined, focused and patient – but our shared belief in creative consistency and focusing our energy on the right things has truly paid off,’ adds Hodge.

The brand was one of this year’s main winners at The IPA Effectiveness Awards, including picking up The Grand Prix, Best New Learning (The Channon Prize) and another Gold award.

Here are five things we learned from reading the entry paper

1. To understand injecting more emotion into the McCain brand, parents were spoken with to gain an understanding of what real family tea times were like across the country. The strong response was that advertising and the media showed fake, unrelatable perfection – or “bullshit” as one mother put it – seeming nothing like their actual lives.

   The brand recognised that it needed to represent real families within its marketing that were more diverse – from single parents to same-sex parents, blended families, and different ethnic groups. They were more liberal in their opinions on divorce, abortion and LGBTQ+ rights. Their teat imes were messy, imperfect, and a lot more joyful. Dinner would often be eaten on the sofa, not the table, while wearing onesies and making each other laugh... and usually splattered with ketchup.

   The resulting “Really Real” strategy would see it produce brand communications that would feature real people from modern Britain while not worrying about table manners and aim to represent the joy of mealtimes as a family. The campaigns ran across channels, always celebrating diverse families and stories.

2. PHD developed a media strategy with a focus on reducing price elasticity and maintaining or increasing base volume sales. This worked across four components:

   • 60:40 Brand: Activation budget split – upweighting brand advertising to deliver on emotion.

   • Emotive channel choices – with a big focus on AV. Over time, PHD optimised this in line with shifting viewing behaviours, with an increasing portion of budget invested in VOD and similar online viewing platforms to achieve incremental reach.

   • Focus on awareness via 1+ reach – to prioritise awareness without compromising on channel selection.

   • Broad targeting with a skew to mums who were/are disproportionately the primary shoppers in families and McCain's largest customer group.

3. This increased awareness in McCain’s advertising. Between 2015 and 2023, its awareness almost doubled from a low of under 7 per cent, 12 months prior to the first ad, to a high of almost 14 per cent by the end of 2023. Over the nine years, the brand also recorded a rise in recognition that McCain “is a brand that brings people together” from 28 per cent to 61 per cent as people began to feel more positive about its advertising. Consideration of the brand across all buyers in the market also increased by 37 over the nine-years since the strategy began.

4. Prior to 2015, McCain has a static approach to media spend, set at around £10 million. Over the years since then, media spend has varied up-and-down, reaching an all-time high in 2023 at around £16 million with the vast majority focused on brand.

5. In October 2023, searches for ‘McCain’ caught up and overtook 'oven chips' – reversing the trend that was proving a major threat to the company in 2015. Critical to the strategy was that it changed the perception that its produce was 'good value for money' by 30 per cent.