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Jumping on the big ‘green’ bandwagon

Posted in Advertising, Marketing July 4th, 2007 by gabay

It’s definitely the season to be PC and embrace green values. Just about everyone from politicians to grocers are at it. PepsiCo’s Walkers crisps are jumping on the bandwagon, keeping their carbon footprint to a minimum by not driving the old wagon too far from home.

Packets of crisps carrying the Carbon Trust’s carbon reduction label will demonstrate Walkers’ commitment to measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of its products and all potatoes. A £7.5m ad campaign (the company’s biggest in ten years) will see Gary Lineker announcing that Walkers’ potatoes will be sourced from British growers, reducing miles between the farm and the stores.

The company’s brand champion will extol the virtues of how loads of UK rain is perfect for growing British Spuds. (Presumably omitting to mention the possible connection between the recent floods and the one trend that the brand really doesn’t want to credit for a bumper crop - Global Warming).

Old fashioned British values in a bag

From a consumer perception point of view, the brand’s switch to cooking in sunseed oil (which is high in mono-unsaturates and naturally low in saturates) has been a great success. However, own-label brands such as Sainsbury’s crisps quickly caught on to the trend by strongly featuring sunflowers on their own crisp packaging sitting alongside shelves carrying Walkers crisps. Now VP of Walkers’ marketing, John Goldstone has gone one better, going retro, redesigning the brand’s packaging back to pre 2006 colours and tweaking the typeface to reflect traditional wholesome values. 

Then, for good measure to ensure that the new message of old values is driven home, following research by Walkers revealing that 27 per cent of consumers don’t believe that Walkers’ standard crisps are made with only potatoes, the brand will remind the great British public that beneath Walkers’ newly designed plastic packaging lays the heart and spud of a real potato rather than a sliced something that (presumably for 27 per cent of shoppers) appears to be something resembling a footballer’s ear fried in low-saturates oil.
 
“Over the past 60 years, consumers have lost the link between potatoes and a bag of crisps,” said Goldstone. “This is worrying, especially as people are looking for more natural foods”. 
 
Quite. But just in case all this ‘returning to natural brand goodness’ is too much for the average 2007 crisp shopper to stand, the brand is reintroducing its popular Worcester sauce flavoured crisps, as well as a new Cajun Spice flavour designed to taste just as good as the real thing in Louisiana.
 
Which all goes to show that when it comes to being environmentally aware, politicians and pundits need to remember the importance of being drenched in 100 per cent traditional British values and standing up for the good old PC - Potato Crisp.
 
Jonathan Gabay
www.brandforensics.co.uk