Marketers, particularly those that emerged after the sudden take-over of marketing by digital platforms, love fireworks.
They talk about big creative ideas, reach, frequency, ideal customers and their profiles, attention and campaigns that become part of popular culture. Meadow Lea had all of that.
It also had a folding table, a loaf of sliced white bread and a woman who knew the product intimately.
That ordinary little table may have mattered just as much as all the hoopla.
In a market full of near-identical products, recognition earns familiarity, then the product feels like an old friend. This reduces mental effort and perceived risk.
Trust comes later.
Advertising can make a promise. Only performance can prove it.
Digital technology has made it easier than ever to start a business. A template, a payment gateway a social media advertising account, and a contract manufacturer can put you into the market by lunchtime.
It has also made it easier than ever to look exactly like everyone else.
Low barriers to entry enabled by digital tools and extended and readily available supply chains creates the opportunity for low-cost product imitation. The ‘noise’ generated by the presence of imitators drowns out anything but highly creative and distinctive brand building effort. This requires consistency, discipline, and a sequence of promise, proof, repetition, and memory to be delivered to consumers.
Advertising makes the promise. The product and the people provide the proof. Repetition turns that proof into an expectation, and the expectation when met consistently becomes trust.
Meadow Lea offers one of Australia’s great examples.
In 1975 I was a newly minted product manager at what later became Meadow Lea Foods. Mojo created the great “You oughta be congratulated” ads that turbo charged Meadow Lea’s market share from single figures in a highly contested and commodified market to around 23% of volume, and a greater share of value and profit.
That long running campaign did more than advertise a brand of margarine. It spoke directly to mothers at a time when more women were entering paid work while still carrying most of the domestic load. Rather than reminding them of another obligation, Meadow Lea congratulated them for what they already did.
The advertising gave the brand real meaning to those in charge of the purchase decision. National distribution made it easy to buy, and product quality kept the promise.
Then the program of supermarket demonstrations made the promise personal.
We selected and trained a small team of demonstrators in each state and kept them working in stores for 40 weeks of the year. They did not simply hand out pieces of bread, or dry biscuit with a smear of margarine on them. They answered questions, explained the product, listened to shoppers, and offered an immediate, risk-free trial.
Nobody entered a supermarket craving a square of white bread covered in margarine. That was only the conversation starter, a small piece of empathy delivered by somebody who understood the challenges being faced in a busy and fractured life that seemed to be changing daily.
The advertising said the brand understood its buyers. The demonstrator behaved as though it did. The first bite turned an abstract promise into evidence, by delivering the pat on the back the advertising promised.
Each demonstration closed a small part of the gap between what Meadow Lea said and what shoppers believed.
Most contemporary marketing teams would call the program difficult to scale. Many finance teams would call it labour intensive, tough to manage, open to shenanigans, and to the sales teams that carried the responsibility of organising the logistics, it was another task to be completed.
All were right, but they also missed the point.
The program worked because we repeated it. Week after week. Store after store. Conversation after conversation.
Someone had to recruit the demonstrators, train them, roster them, supply them and maintain the standard. Nobody won an advertising award for any of that. It was however a key to the work of building the foundations of the Meadow Lea brand.
Many businesses now reverse the sequence. They spend heavily making a promise, then leave the proof to an overloaded receptionist, an unanswered email, a poorly informed salesperson, or a late delivery.
Nothing destroys expensive advertising faster than cheap execution.
A brand operates like a trust account. Marketing opens it, but every customer experience either makes a deposit or a withdrawal.
One supermarket sample did not build Meadow Lea. Thousands of consistent conversations helped do it.
The jingle earned attention, the product tasting, evidence that the brand did what it said, earned belief.
Attention can make you famous.
Repeated proof or performance, and empathy with the key buyers builds trust, which creates a resilient brand.
