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

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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!