A different kind of mayo clinic

Editor’s note: Dick Scott is president and chief planning officer of Edelmann Scott Inc., a Richmond, Va., advertising agency.

It’s common for respondents to be given tasks to complete prior to attending a focus group session. These bits of pre-group homework can include relatively painless endeavors like using a product in their home, taking photographs of important facets of their lives, or keeping track of purchases or TV viewing habits.

Some aren’t so painless. Just ask the respondents who were asked to give up mayonnaise for a week.

This cruel request was imposed on four groups of 45 mayo users in an attempt to uncover the substance’s allure and thus help reposition the Duke’s mayonnaise brand of Richmond, Va.-based C.F. Sauer Company. The research project was developed and managed by Richmond-based Edelmann Scott Inc., C.F. Sauer’s agency of record, and used to drive an award-winning television advertising campaign.

The Duke’s story

Duke’s is the leading brand of mayonnaise sold in the Southeast. On the market for 75 years, the product is more than a mere condiment; generations have made it a family tradition. But prior to the research, Duke’s hadn’t enjoyed any promotion since 1950 and the times were changing rapidly.

Sales information showed - true to typical geographic market churn - that the market’s landscape was beginning to shift. The challenge was to protect and increase share while building awareness among two separate audiences — the Southern “natives” who knew and loved the brand, and the Midwest and Northern “migrants” who brought their other brand loyalties with them.

Wants and needs

Understanding the consumer’s motivation to buy is critical to a brand’s success. One of the biggest mistakes companies often make is to go where many have been before without thinking about the consumer’s wants and needs. To deliver truly effective marketing communications, companies must always begin and end their efforts by listening to the customer.

To help companies listen to the consumer, Edelmann Scott created an approach called MarketVision, which takes out the “I thinks” and replaces them with “the market says” — the kind of information that drives all communications planning, including branding and positioning. Because at the end of the day, does it really matter what a CEO or an advertising agency thinks will drive a consumer response? Not really.

What really matters is designing communications efforts targeted to what the consumer wants and thinks. What will prompt the decision to buy? Or the decision to prefer one brand over another? What does the consumer need to make his or her life better, to solve a problem or to enhance a lifestyle?

This approach takes the techniques of the typical research toolbox and adds the strategic thinking of a marketer to drive each step along the way. It begins with a focused visioning session followed by product benefit and positioning identification that is then tested and validated by the marketplace. The process can take anywhere from two to six months to complete. Out of it comes the “something” that a company’s communications efforts must do in order to drive sales or awareness rather than a listing of attributes, which leads to advertising that only reaches parity instead of breaking away from the pack.

Goals defined

A four-hour visioning session kicked off the Duke’s process. Goals were defined, deliverables were identified and ways to achieve goals were discussed and agreed upon. In order to create a meaningful session, one that encouraged honest voices from all product channels, we had to involve key stakeholders from the CEO to the field sales managers. Without these voices present in one room, at one time, the session would be off track.

The visioning session resulted in 15 core statements about the product which were explored by respondents in the focus groups. The statements focused on attributes like creaminess, tartness and price. From the original 15, five were identified as the winners to be taken to the validation stage.

Surprisingly strong emotional elements were revealed during the process. In addition to abstaining from mayo consumption for a week, focus group participants were asked to keep food diaries about their feelings. Many were reduced to cheating. And nearly every person confessed that it was harder than they thought to give up mayonnaise. Their reasons may have differed, but the difficulty was certainly there.

We found that the mayonnaise category was surrounded by nostalgia, evoking memories of holidays, picnics and stories of family. Positioning statements about attributes (such as “no additives”) were rejected as customer benefits.

An advertising campaign was developed to position Duke’s mayonnaise amidst the category leaders, an approach which we knew appealed to those migrants from outside our markets. Television was used as the ideal branding medium because its memorable audio and visual components. The creative execution tapped into the position revealed through quantitative research: “Natural, wholesome ingredients for over 75 years” coupled with an “emotional comfort.”

In one of the ads - the award-winning “Big Cookie” - a grandmother cooking with Duke’s takes offense at the announcer’s suggestion that her mayonnaise of choice is the secret to her culinary genius. “I’ve baked cookies bigger than you,” she says, glaring into the camera.

In four months, Duke’s market share grew three percentage points. Duke’s unaided brand awareness increased 18 percentage points and one-third of Duke’s target audience could recall the television spot and its sponsor. In addition, Duke’s share of unit growth exceeded category growth by 7.8 percent.

Recipe for success

Because our approach takes out the “I thinks” and presents the agency and the client with “the market says,” we were able to create an advertising campaign for Duke’s that met the needs of the consumer. It was a recipe for success; had we left out any one of the ingredients, or made incorrect substitutions, the end result would have been unpalatable.