Iglo Group to shake-up €100m marketing strategy for frozen brands
Iglo Group is to spend the bulk of its €100m (£83m) marketing budget on initiatives designed to make its Birds Eye, Findus and Iglo brands more appealing to adult diners.
The frozen food maker is said to be unifying all three brands under one pan-European strategy for the first time to focus on innovation.
It will expand into new frozen meal occasions such as snacking and breakfast with the business looking to build on the success of recent product launches such as its Rice Fusions and Bake to Perfection ranges. Several marketers will also be recruited in the coming weeks to help identify new opportunities in markets including the UK, France and Italy.
It is hoped new products will shift perceptions of Iglo’s brands beyond the children’s teatime market as it looks to introduce a more premium positioning around value. The frozen food maker vowed to grow its brands around taste and pleasure to create “more emotional value” for shoppers following the arrival of new chief executive Elio Leoni Sceti earlier this year.
The former Reckitt Benckiser marketer believes Iglo’s focus on dominating the children’s tea-time market frozen market has come at the expense of exploiting emerging “consumption occasions” fast enough, according to a source close to the matter. It has attempted to appeal to adult diners through recent activity from its Birds Eye brand, however, the company is understood to be pushing for it to be a more prominent point of difference across its lineup.
The second half of the refresh strategy is thought to include an increased investment into digital platforms such as Facebook and mobile advertising. Leoni Sceti, who has invested in a number of digital start-ups including Zeebox, is understood to expect Iglo’s brands to steal a march on rivals in the online arena by tying digital activations closer to TV campaigns.
Birds Eye’s marketing director Margaret Jobling recently told Marketing Week the brand would be testing more social media and mobile marketing initiatives over the next 12 months to prove that it can convert online engagement into sales.
To help achieve the strategy, the frozen food maker is re-pitching all its advertising, design and media buying briefs, according to the source, with a view to developing campaigns that change perceptions of frozen food from one of “desperation”, to it being the choice for food “inspiration”. The shake-up will affect Iglo Group’s existing agencies including AMV BBDO, Mindshare and OMD. Agencies being asked to pitch are said to include Havas, which worked with Leoni Sceti during his time at Reckitt Benckiser, while Publicis and DDB are also believed to be names in the frame.
