THE GLORIA REPOSITIONING
CAMPAIGN
By Angela. E. Mpala.
Angela is the Senior Brand Manager at National Foods Zimbabwe. She is
responsible for the Gloria brand
Gloria is a brand that is turning 96 years old this year. It
has been Trusted since 1920. The opportunity that exists in dealing with
heritage brands is that they are brands that are well known with the older
generation and seem to be losing relevance to the younger generation. It was
this dilemma that led to Project Sun which is the code name for the Gloria repositioning
campaign. This is the story of repositioning Gloria from being a well-known,
well-loved and trusted flour to being an Iconic symbol that stands for women’s
upliftment and empowerment to being more than just flour.
The challenge was to redefine the brand and make it
contemporary without losing the essence of what the brand is about. This
required a structured and scientific approach.
Step 1: What is
consumer insight?
The first step in redefining a brand is to find out the key
functional and emotional attributes that consumers value in a brand. Through a
rigorous process of exploring the brand’s heritage and assessing the
relationship the target market has developed over the years, to projecting
where the brand can and will go, the team settled on a simple articulation of
the new Gloria: It rises every time so that you can shine!
The essence of the campaign focuses on the brand as a
catalyst to a mother’s hero moment while obviating the role of the product-
assurance of baking success
Step 2: Identify
the Opportunity
After identifying the consumer insight, how do we translate
it into something relevant that resonates with the target market and is aligned
to the brand? To do that aptly, we had to study women.
So what do women do
on a daily basis?
What do they do when they are happy?
What do they do when they are sad?
How do they celebrate?
The answer is that mums all over the world sing. They sing
when they work, they sing when they are happy, they sing when sad. When they
sing, their mood is uplifted. When they sing, they uplift everyone around them!
Song is an uplifting catalyst. It positively transforms The same can be said
for Gloria flour which rises and enables women to shine
Step 3: Execution
is all in the detail and the ambition
Having conceptualised what needed to be done, the next step
was to implement this momentous task in a way that displays exceptional
execution. To reinforce within ourselves the drive and size of the project we
wanted we renamed the project from Project Sun to Project ICONIC. This became
our yardstick in everything we did. Before we implemented anything we asked the
following questions:
Is it ICONIC?
Is it World Class?
We did not proceed until the answer to both of these
questions was YES!
The song recording
The team engaged the services of award winning music
producer and song writer Andrew Baird to come up with the Gloria song. The
brief was clear, it was to be inspiring and uplifting while driving the key
brand attributes.
With the song composed the next step was to identify the
artists that would feature on the song. The thinking behind this is around the
fact that women are such a diverse group of people. They listen to music that
cuts across genres be it Gospel, R n B, Afro-pop, Sungura, Dancehall and Mbira
fusion. We looked for the ICONIC artists in each of these categories and came
up with the following Sebastian Magacha (Gospel), Alaina - an upcoming artist
from Bulawayo(R n B), Selmor Mutukudzi (Afro Pop), Sulumani Chimbetu (Sungura),
Shinsoman (DanceHall) and Jah Prayzah with his unique blend of Mbira fusion.
These top artists brought in their own unique vibe and
experience to make the song unique to Gloria and to Zimbabwe. The next step was
how do we take this to the consumer and engage them in a way that stands from
the advertising clutter already in the market.
A key aspect of working with celebrities, apart from managing diaries
and treading carefully across entertainment brands was respecting their talent
and unique signatures. A combination of the clarity emanating from our brand
vision and professionalism by the team delivered a great result. We ended up
with a final product which surpassed our original expectation.
Step 4: How do we
increase sales
The birth of Project Qoki/Gogogoi was brought about by a
need to have a revenue element to the repositioning campaign. As is the case
with every company there needs to be a return on investment and more often than
not this needs to be apparent in the short term timespan, a difficult thing
when trying to build brand equity for the long haul. We managed to deliver on
both.
Using the same insight that women love subtle
acknowledgement this led to the conceptualisation of a consumer promotion with
an objective to create demand at the household level. The entire route to
market was to benefit from this via the pull of product by consumers as they
participate in the promo.
To participate a consumer buys Gloria 2kg flour and retains
the flour pack for redemption
Step 5: Taking it
to the market
The Gloria campaign was a monster of a project to manage. The
project planning master looked like something from an engineering project
workbook. In terms of roll out sequence, the key was to set the right
environment for the launch. This meant starting the “communication” a month
before the target launch date in prelaunch hypes. This consisted of articles in
the press to create suspense around the Tours, radio interviews and posters of
the tour put up around the country.
The Outcomes
The Gloria tours were held across the country and well
attended. The objective of making Gloria relevant to its current target market
was achieved in style.
1.
An internal
staff launch
The internal staff launch got the people that make the flour
get excited about it. It got their buy in and made them advocates for the
campaign
2.
A country-wide
bus tour with the artists
Gloria took the artists to the people in a bus tour across
the country
3.
A
procession preceded each tour
.
4.
A World
class stage
5.
Well
attended shows
6.
More than
12 Public Relations articles written about the Gloria
7. The
Gloria song was played free to air in radio. For the first time ever a new song
associated somewhat with a commercial campaign has received free airplay on rotation.
It was also positively rated on the Star FM rate it or hate it program.
8.
Biggest
social media impact
Gloria worked with Bus stop to produce a comic skit on the
repositioning campaign and the song. It reached over a quarter of a million
people and more that 68K views in 2 weeks.
What is in the
next step?
Brand repositioning is a continuous process. This was just
the introduction. There is a lot more to come from Gloria. Watch this space!
