Firefly

The Challenge

Firefly has been around for decades and has been steadily growing through its focus on food service. Whilst the brand’s owners, Purity Drinks, understood their catering direct market well, they had little insight into the end consumers who were choosing the brand.

Purity had already undertaken a U&A study to understand how the soft drinks category is understood, bought, and consumed. The study also looked at the key benefits consumers were looking for and how Firefly ranked.

Purity needed support going beyond the ‘what’ and getting to the ‘so what’ from its research and to understand how it should position the brand to maximise growth potential.

The Solution

We began by extracting the insight from the research, working with the agency that carried out the research to develop attitudinal audience personas that reflect the key needs in the category. We then worked together to develop brand positioning concepts which we tested in focus groups to get to a clearly defined positioning and target attitudinal audience.

Having defined the potential audience, we worked with our media buying partner, Total Media, to ensure that we could use TGI data to identify and target these attitudinal audiences and which media channels to use, ultimately sizing the audience to a potential 9.7m people who are likely to be interested in buying a product like Firefly.

Atalante then developed a full marketing strategy including strategic direction for pricing, distribution strategy, product and packaging development, comms and creative.

To embed the strategy and develop the tactical plan, we ran a series of workshops with the brand team to identify the key growth initiatives for the next year.

Atalante continued to work with the Firefly team in a transitionary capacity to develop their in-year brand plans including working with the team’s creative agency Thumbstoppers to develop a new creative strategy, direction, and ad campaign across TV, print and digital channels.

The Impact

Firefly now understands who it appeals to and why. The brand has clear direction on how it needs to evolve to better reach, appeal to and drive purchase with this audience to grow.

We deliberately pulled Firefly apart from JuiceBurst (owned by the same company) to ensure the brands are going after very different audiences and focusing on different media, distribution channels and pricing strategies to maximise each brand’s growth and minimise overlap.

Services Used

• Working with existing research and insight
• Audience identification, sizing, and segmentation
• Marketing strategy and 4Ps framework (product, price, communications and creative, distribution) 
• Media and channel strategy
• Brand planning and implementation
  

“Firefly was a bit of a problem child. It performed well wherever it was listed but we didn’t have the insight on who bought it or why. This made it tough for us to sell into the trade and meant we were unclear on what our on-pack and comms messages should be. With a super clear audience, positioning and messaging hierarchy, we now have the confidence to invest in the Firefly brand, to drive new listings and develop a compelling and differentiated comms campaign.”