Now That's Proper Champion!
We’re celebrating Yorkshire Day with a quick look at our Top 5 favourite Yorkshire businesses which happen could be on to summat with their marketing strategies.
Originally a military celebration, Yorkshire Day was reborn in 1975 as a protest to the newly created territory of Humberside - not a successful rebrand as it happens. Thankfully, common sense prevailed and the East Riding of Yorkshire was restored. Still, every year on the 1st August, a different Yorkshire town or city is declared host, the Yorkshire flag carried to its four walls and a declaration swearing loyalty to the county is read aloud!
So, we're doing our bit for county loyalty by sharing our Top 5 Yorkshire businesses whose brand strategies are worthy of special mention.
The City of Hull
The story: unknown to most, Hull (or Kingston upon Hull to give it its full name) suffered significant bombing in the second world war and 95% of housing was damaged or destroyed.
The positioning: some seriously big businesses have made Hull their home thanks to its port access to Europe and the city has gained a reputation as a base for heavy industry and advanced engineering, but….
The challenge: the city centre has continued to suffer disinvestment, the unemployment rate remained stubbornly high and in 2015 Hull was voted one of the worst places to live in the UK.
The fight back: Hull pulled off one of the most audacious rebrands so far this century when, in 2017, it became UK City of Culture. As a centre for bold thinking and radicalism (think William Wilberforce, Mary Wollstonecraft, Amy Johnson, Stevie Smith, Phillip Larkin and Andrew Motion to name but a few), the city didn’t just create a new logo and put on a few events, it developed a new brand identity, assets, and codes to cement its positioning.
Our verdict: 10/10
The UK City of Culture marketing campaign was stunningly executed and helped to shift perceptions of the city, not only outside Hull (the campaign generated six million visitors) but for its residents too.
It recognised culture isn’t just about arts and music generally – it’s about the people of a place and their stories, and this was the foundation for the campaign’s creative idea ‘there is more to the story’.
2017 started by telling the stories people already knew and then unveiling those they didn’t in truly engaging and memorable ways. From the bringing to life of the mythic ‘magic ginnels’ to the monumental installation of a 75m offshore turbine blade, positioned under the cloak of darkness into the city centre, the campaign brought together imagination and creativity with the people and businesses at its heart.
National awareness more than tripled over the course of the project, rising to 66% nationally and 74% in the north and more than £220m of economic impact and inward investment for the city was delivered.
Thanks to this audacious project, Hull is a city on the up and as we say in Yorkshire ‘be reight’!
Video highlights of the City of Culture campaign >
Yorkshire Tea
The story: with a long history going back to the late 1800s, Yorkshire Tea is the powerhouse of the Bettys & Taylors Group, whose eponymous brands are Bettys (as in the famous tea rooms) and Taylors of Harrogate Speciality Teas & Coffee. Yorkshire Tea was born in the 1970s when the business wanted a way to take black tea to the masses without damaging existing brands.
The positioning: A proper brew from gods own country! Yorkshire Tea’s purpose and strategy is woven around ‘doing things properly’ and lives throughout the business from the way it sources its tea to the superior quality of its products.
The brand magic really happened when they teamed up with Lucky Generals who created the fantastically successful ‘Proper’ campaign which helped propel the brand from third in the category with 14% share to first with 28%.
The challenge: if there’s one thing that Yorkshire Tea have had a patchy record on, its bringing new products to market. It made a failed bid to move sideways into the biscuit category and whilst the premium blend Yorkshire Gold has endured, without NPD, Yorkshire Tea could start to appear a little old-fashioned compared with some of its rivals.
The fight back: the most recent launches present an interesting take on the brand’s irreverence. The Breakfast and Bedtime blends seem obvious extensions, but the Biscuit and Toast & Jam blends (yes – teas which taste like biscuits and toast and jam) seem like a real leap for the brand into a more fun and funky space. Gone too is the classic Yorkshire scene depicted on the packaging. The proof while be in the drinking!
Our verdict: 9/10
Overall, Yorkshire Tea continues to be a consummate lesson in having a consistent, clear, single-minded brand strategy which embraces purpose without being straight-jacketed by an overly holier than thou proposition.
Skipton Building Society
The story: established in 1853 in Skipton, the Society’s original business model was based on agencies rather than branches and it took over 75 years to achieve £1m in assets.
The positioning: in 1991, newly appointed Chief Exec, John Goodfellow embarked on a programme of diversification which saw The Skipton acquire an estate agent business as well as continuing to acquire other failing societies.
The Skipton weathered the credit crunch of 2008 by focusing on its mortgage business and harnessing the synergy from its estate agent subsidiary.
The challenge: by 2020, the business was the fourth largest building society in the UK and perhaps because of this, the leadership team were unconvinced about the need for significant long-term brand investment, preferring instead to focus on shorter-term, functionally oriented messaging.
The fight back: the marketing team embarked on creative development research to define the customer value proposition. The amazingly obvious, but under-leveraged finding, was that, although people look at interest rates first when deciding where to invest, the power of the brand, knowing it and trusting it, accounted for a good proportion of prospective customers’ decision making. People simply don’t trust a good interest alone.
Our verdict: 8/10
Much of the good marketing stuff that we applaud was done internally and has perhaps yet to achieve its full value from a consumer-facing perspective.
A new value proposition – building better futures since 1853 – was created to underpin heritage, scale and status as a building society against the ‘enemy’ of fat cat banks. The business devoted 45% of ATL spend to sponsoring ITV’s late peak drama strand specifically to grow brand awareness – first you must know we exist!
Spontaneous awareness as a savings product provider increased by 230% in less than a year which won the brand the coveted Marketing Week Masters award for bringing insight and research to life.
Panache
The story: what could a couple of blokes from Sheffield possibly know about bras? Plenty as it happens! Panache, the D+ specialist bra brand, is a family-run business that will mark its 40th anniversary next year.
The positioning: they channel their innovative technical expertise into functionally first and foremost because ‘every woman deserves a bra that fits’. Amen to that!
The challenge: lingerie is certainly a category that suffers from the ‘male gaze’ and quite often only looks good on narrowly defined body types depicted in typical lingerie adverts.
Whilst you may think that fitting correctly is a hygiene factor in bras, there’s not a single woman out there who doesn’t appreciate the struggle and many brands miss the mark going for style over substance. The challenge for Panache, for a whole bunch of reasons that we won’t go into here, is that ‘pretty’ has always sold when it comes to bras.
The fight back: Panache have shaped their core competencies and their business and brand strategies on meeting the unmet needs of a very clear and specific audience.
Our verdict: 7/10
In their styling and throughout their comms, Panache celebrates beauty and strength, using a female gaze instead of a male one. They prove that you don’t need to be different from competitors to win. They’ve capitalised on relative advantage – investing in the technology and expertise to deliver a better fitting bra – and have done so with style and distinctiveness.
Seabrook Crisps
The story: a family-owned business for many years, Seabrook is thought to have pioneered the crinkle cut crisp.
The positioning: the brand originally had a focus on locally sourced, high quality ingredients and strong flavours ‘lovingly made in Yorkshire’. This was married with a quirky and distinctive personality, a sense of craft and doing things proper.
The challenge: Perhaps through a combination of overzealous value engineering and lack of marketing investment, Seabrook seemed to have lost their meaning and salience.
The fight back: new owners Calbee have reinvested in flavour, packaging and comms with a resurrection of their original values and positioning. The new strapline ‘made with pride’ feels like a powerful idea to leverage associations with Yorkshire grit and doing things properly.
Our verdict: 6/10
As good as the packaging, NPD, and TV advertising looks, we don’t feel they’ve yet found a way to bring this positioning fully to life or articulated a strong enough reason to choose Seabrooks. Great to see some intention though…. we really hope to see this old favourite get back on the horse.
