Raising Dough

How Tip Top is innovating the media landscape through owned media assets.

Bringing innovation to the table is every marketer’s challenge: innovation that creates a better customer experience and delivers sustainable growth and profitable revenue back to the business. Like many FMCGs, the bakery category has its fair share of challenges. With bakery products bought by more than 95 per cent of Australian households, this is a highly competitive category defined by low margins and high volumes and a mix of branded, private-label, in-store and shopfront bakery offers. Innovation, therefore, is not a nice-to-have, it’s a point-of-entry requirement for category survival.

New media opportunity

The relationship between media and brands is evolving rapidly. Media businesses such as Fairfax, News Corp Australia and the TV networks are becoming retailers in their own right, selling branded products and experiences through their media vehicles. On the other hand, retailers are becoming media owners and now, through its packaging, so is Tip Top. In collaboration with Sonder Communications we have developed a new and powerful media channel, Bread Connect, with unrivalled potential to connect with consumers in a relevant and uncluttered environment. This new channel has these unique benefits:

Mass audience

Every month, Tip Top brands are an essential ingredient in more than 17 million kitchens across the country. We’re not just a producer of Australia’s favourite bakery brands and products – we’re also a media owner. Our audience numbers rival the biggest media owners in the country.Take, for example, Seven West Media, one of Australia’s most powerful media groups. It promotes the fact that it reaches 16 million Australians a month. This is total reach across all of its media assets, including TV, magazine, digital and newspapers.

Segmented – you are what you eat

Food choices are a powerful way to segment a mass audience and reach targeted consumers. The Burgen household, for instance, skews heavily to singles and couples, prioritises health and nutrition benefits and is prepared to pay a little more. This is in contrast to, say, the Tip Top/Sunblest household looking for smart value with clean and simple credentials, often to feed their larger families. Using grocery-basket data, or simpler techniques, other relevant brands seeking to connect with grocery shoppers and consumers alike can select the right audience profile based on the bread they choose to eat.

A natural fit

Bread is a natural medium for other food brands. It has been around for more than 30,000 years in some form or another and, for much of that time, has been a host product for other foods, such as butter, oil, spreads, fruit, vegetables, fish and meat.As a product, bread physically accompanies other foods, so it stands to good reason that bread brands such as Tip Top can naturally and authentically accommodate other relevant brands’ messaging.

Bread Connect

And so Bread Connect was created. We have the audience numbers and the ability to segment the audience, and bread is a natural host medium for other brands. The challenge then was to develop a physical medium that would appeal to our consumers and to other brands. Working with Sonder Communications and Kwik Lok, we developed a format to augment our packaging. A 7cm x 7cm, double-sided, laminated card is attached to the plastic Kwik Lok tag that keeps the plastic bread bag cinched.

Media convergence

The Bread Connect tags give relevant brands a direct connection with grocery buyers. Uniquely, the tags are a reflection of media convergence – a term usually reserved for digital media, not something as analogue as Bread Connect. Media convergence represents the coming together of the points of media consumption and transaction, which is precisely what Bread Connect achieves. The medium is disrupted at critical times – in the store and in the kitchen, every time the bread bag is opened and closed. Importantly though, it doesn’t cross the line of being annoying or intrusive to shoppers or consumers.

Creating a medium with efficacy

In order to ensure Bread Connect was a powerful communications vehicle and, importantly, would not alienate or annoy our loyal customers, we recently conducted an in-home study. What we found was incredibly heartening: 86 per sent of shoppers noticed the Bread Connect advertisement and, of these people:

• 48% recalled the advertised brand
• 97% recalled the message
• 76% said the message was relevant to them
• 68% increased brand consideration
• 48% said it increased their purchase intent.

These are communication scores that would be deemed ‘off the chart’ for any mass medium.

Getting started

For Tip Top, working with Sonder Communications helped us to realise the potential of the medium, making the decision to reimagine ourselves as a media owner easier. It has certainly not been without its challenges. Bread Connect is a new medium and ‘new’ requires marketers to be willing to try something different. In the first year or so we are working only with complementary brands whose product is used with bread. We are also offering the medium only for a limited number of months to ensure our customer experience is not adversely affected. The brands that so far have embraced this innovative channel include Unilever’s Flora Pro-Activ, which advertised with our Burgen brand.

Get on board

If, like us, you believe brands will continue to explore and develop new ways of reaching and connecting with consumers, then we’re just getting started.The reality is many global brands are already monetising their assets, with the likes of Apple, Mondele ̄z, Virgin and Pepsi, to name a few. For more details about Bread Connect, contact Sonder Communications: info@sondermedia.com