Behind The British Cereal Brand Targeting Marketers On LinkedIn

There aren’t many start-up breakfast cereal brands that have aimed to target the marketing professional consumer as a core customer. But Surreal, one of the fastest-growing independent brands in Britain, is doing just that. And the industry seems to be eating it right up.

The three-year-old nutritional cereal brand has been producing marketing campaigns that have deliberately focused on capturing the attention of the advertising community by lampooning the work of its more established competitors and with unexpected collaborations.

Founded in 2021 during the pandemic by Vita Coco executives Jac Chetland and Kit Gammell, who were sales director and head of marketing respectively before choosing to set up their own thing.

Surreal has already secured listings in Sainsbury’s, Co-op, Holland & Barrett, Ocado, Booths, Whole Foods Market and independents. It has also brokered some unexpected product partnerships with brands such as Gymshark, live entertainment platform the Night Time Industry Association, and even Viagra producer Numan.

“Surprise is about 90 per cent of our marketing,” says Gammell when asked about the strategy behind the partnerships. “When we look at partnerships we always want it to be unexpected, but we always hope that it will also have crossover in terms of audiences.”

While he admits the Viagra partnership is hard to justify, he says creating a high protein strawberry shake-flavoured cereal named ‘Cardi-Os’ with Gymshark overlaps for both health-conscious consumer bases.

Surreal’s eye-catching marketing

Over the last two years, the brand has become much talked about, using stunt marketing campaigns that directly ‘appeal’ to the marketing sector in their use of troll-like humour. This is then shared and commented on through its social media platform of choice – LinkedIn.

BBH co-founder Sir John Hegarty is a fan of the brand’s creative output, claiming that Surreal proves a point he has long been making: “Principles remain, practices change.”

He continues: “[Surreal] show how to build a brand using humour, irreverence and very little money. The most important ingredient in their programme is creativity. You may not be able to outspend the competition, but you can out think them. Engaging, funny and as I’ve said irreverent. It’s not surprising they’re the UK’s fastest growing cereal brand.”

Surprisingly Gammell doesn’t see this as a whole-hearted strategy, explaining that it has come out of their consideration of children's cereals being full of both flavour and personality, which would build emotional connections with consumers.

The aim is to somehow package the childhood nostalgia developed around those cereal brands and redeliver it in an adult manner, he explains.

“We wanted to be this playful brand, but playful for kids would probably mean going outside, running around and playing. Playful for adults is a bit more sophisticated. It's humour, it's wit, and, if possible, a bit of sarcasm," he continues.

Ad industry baiting

Surreal currently has a marketing and creative team of four to oversee, create and execute each project and outsources video production and PR.

Campaigns produced have mainly focused on out-of-home activations that are then shared through LinkedIn. One activation featured two neighbouring poster sites: one poster featured a picture of Surreal boxes and bowls of cereal with the statement ‘Our high protein cereal is now in Sainsbury’s’. Right next to that was another unbranded poster where two of the team were situated on a plinth, suited and booted while holding megaphones. That poster read: ‘Here’s our sales team to tell you all about it’.

One online ad campaign featured people with famous names commending the brand. The cheeky ad was then followed up with a film featuring Michael, Surreal’s head of legal, becoming increasingly frustrated as a similar campaign is filmed with people who have similar sounding names to rival cereal brands.

Another poster asked passers-by whether they worked in marketing while offering them a yes/no chart with the response to ‘yes’ leading to the message ‘Please buy our cereal’ and then onto an image of a box of Surreal. Meanwhile, ‘No’ led to the message ‘While we would love it if you also bought our cereal, we’re afraid you don’t get your own advert. Soz.’

This activation, alongside three other posters, was part of the ‘Marketing for Marketers’ campaign which then saw pics of each placed on LinkedIn. These generated over 500 comments as the ad industry did what it does best on the platform - debated whether the work was any good or not.

Gemmell admits that "to a degree" the work is geared towards marketers - who are still people that eat cereal.

“Our first marketing goal is top-of-funnel awareness, and that's quite a wide blanket we try and throw," he says. "Now, if you go further down our comms and marketing strategy, we'll look into consideration; how do you get someone to purchase. The first port of call as a new business is zero people have heard of us, so our goal is to get as many people as possible just to have heard of us.”

And then there was the return of [not] Barry Scott – with the actor Neil Burgess behind the long-running Cillit Bang ads reproducing his loud, to-camera promotional schtick, only this time for Surreal.

“Bosh – and the hunger is gone,” he states during the near-two minute online film. Gammell promises that the ad wasn’t poking fun, but simply another example of the brand playfully tapping into audience nostalgia.

He explains that each campaign begins with the brainstorming of an idea and the feasibility of delivering it. In this case, the team wanted to emulate some great ads, considering ads from brands like Guinness and Skittles, before landing on the idea of introducing 'Gary Scott' in homage to the original.

“Then you quickly got into feasibility; but could we actually find him? We found him and then it snowballed into life.”

The social media element

Gammell admits that LinkedIn isn’t the most traditional channel for a breakfast cereal to build its marketing strategy around but he sees it as a place where adults can be encouraged to be more playful.

“It is a perfect fit for our tone of voice, and what we're trying to do. Our customer is probably within the 25-to-44 age range, and unfortunately as we grow older, we're all spending more time on LinkedIn and less time on Tiktok.”

Despite having a paid social budget, the activity on LinkedIn has been entirely organic so far, and mostly focused on using images over creating video content for the platform.

“For anything that's non-video, we just play around and test lots of things. We spend a lot of time thinking about our tone of voice and words often don't need much else other than the words themselves. So, a lot of the content you see will just be carousels or statics with words. Generally, we find the simpler the better in conveying the message,” he reveals.

With a desire to become mainstream and perhaps one day go global, Surreal is a British brand to watch out for and one that agencies and their creative teams will surely be queuing up to work with down the line.