A Proper Fame Campaign, Part 1

How Yorkshire Tea took on category leaders and won.

Imagine that it’s 2017. You’re the CMO of Yorkshire Tea, one of the last family-owned tea companies in the country and the #3 Standard Black Tea brand in the UK. 

Easiest job on the planet, right? Brits drink tea; you make tea. All you have to do is keep doing what you’re doing, and you’re home and dry.

If only it were that simple:

• You’re in a mature, low-growth category. Everyone knows about tea. There aren’t any real innovations left. And tea has 3.3x more loyalty than the average FMCG category, which means tea drinkers are more likely to be locked into a preferred brand.
• You’re in a declining category. Tea sales have been falling steadily since the 1970s. Older people aren’t drinking as much tea as they used to, and younger people aren’t picking up the slack.

• Your sales happen to be up. Profits, however, are down. 
• With 18.3% market share you’re in okay shape. But you’re a long way from the top, and own-label brands are nipping at your heels.

• The category leaders — PG Tips and Tetley at #1 and #2 — have been running the same long-term campaigns for over 50 years. That means they have much more mental availability than you do. So you’re not quite top of mind in relevant buying situations. 

Do you …

Stay the course? Sometimes this is a perfectly acceptable strategy, and having a reliable revenue stream is a good thing. But in a declining category with decreasing profits, it’s probably not the best idea. 

Go all in, aim for the top spot and attempt to become the market leader? Ooh! A big, bold swing. Reminds us of Lou Brown and the 1989 Cleveland Indians. We love it. Let’s do this!

Of course, it isn’t going to be easy. So what might you do? Well …

You could lean into short-term sales tactics like discounting. The short game is important, but sales are only part of the equation. Profit is the other part, and it’s your biggest challenge. Frequent discounting destroys margins and increases price sensitivity. You want the opposite of that. 

You could do a massive rebrand. Do not do a massive rebrand. 

You could go big on long-term brand building. Yes, and you do that already. The challenge here is that you’re in a mature, stable category with almost no room to maneuver. You need something a little more interesting.

Or you could go big on a long-term, fame-building campaign. Now we’re talking.

That’s exactly what Yorkshire Tea did. Their goal was to become the #1 Standard Black Tea brand in England, so they went all in on a proper long-term fame campaign.

“Yorkshire Tea. Where everything’s done proper.”

The first thing they needed was an insight, a big idea that could support a long-term creative campaign. Eventually, the big idea came directly from Yorkshire Tea’s internal culture of “Doing things proper.” It’s not a revolutionary insight, but what grew out of it is fantastic.

And “doing things proper” comes from Yorkshire itself. 

As you probably know, Yorkshire is a county in northern England with its own dialect and distinct cultural identity. Slightly provincial, gregarious, honest, hard-working, down to earth … that’s generally the vibe.

Over the years, Yorkshire Tea has managed to turn Yorkshire and “Yorkshire-ness” into both a relative differentiation and a distinctive brand asset. Because while there’s nothing terribly special about tea — it’s a commodity after all — there is something unique about Yorkshire. 

And for this campaign, they lean in even more with the use of homegrown celebrities. 

The ads are funny, goofy and oddly inspiring. Even better, they’re shareable. Even better than that, the creative work has been wonderfully consistent over eight years. And it’s still going. 

So has it worked? How well did it work? Did Yorkshire Tea become the market leader?

Of course it worked, and we’ll be back with the business results next week! See you then.

Sources!

“Yorkshire Tea: Long-term brand building done proper” – WARC, IPA

“The Surprising Case for Low Market Share” – Harvard Business Review