Sarina carries off the mountain
By Heart creates a romantic, nature-inspired brand world for Butter
By Heart creates a romantic natural brand world for butterBy Luca Aloisi Despite the agricultural reform, butter sales are still stagnating. Consumer behavior or cholesterol hysteria: With top model Sarina Arnold as the new butter woman, By Heart wants to melt the butter mountain for the Swiss Milk Producers (SMP).
Nothing is in butter anymore. Although ACNielsen has noted a slight increase in sales in the Swiss retail trade over the past twelve months, only a fraction is sold through this channel. The Butter Industry Organization (BOB) paints a less favorable picture. According to this organization, the Swiss consumed just under 4,500 tons of butter in processed or natural form in 2001. That is 4.8 percent less than in the previous year.
While Heinrich Geissbühler, treasurer of BOB, stated in Schweizer Bauer that "a butter mountain is not to be expected at the moment", BOB Managing Director Peter Ryser came to the opposite conclusion in Facts: "If we cannot significantly increase milk fat sales, we will have a butter mountain at the end of the year." Ryser expects the surplus to grow to around 8,000 tons by the end of the milk year (April 2003) and cost a good CHF 80 million. Does liberalized agriculture not function according to the laws of the free market economy after all?
Margarine just melts a little faster than butter
The only thing that is certain is that the reduction in milk quotas envisaged by the SMP has no legal basis and is therefore dependent on the goodwill of the farmers. And that the thirst is too small to drink away the milk produced. The problem is exacerbated by the trend towards low-fat dairy products.
Because producers pay 0.52 centimes per kilo of milk delivered and the federal government pays a maximum of the same amount for marketing measures, the advertising budget has remained constant at best in recent years. This is in stark contrast to the broad impact of the advertising campaigns of various margarine brands and private labels, not to mention the cumulative advertising pressure.
They benefited from the debate about animal versus vegetable fats and exploited this position in their favor. Margarine advertising consistently conveys the image of the vital consumer, whose outward appearance suggests a conscious diet and enviable health, as the testimonial appearances from Lätta to Becel or the family idyll of Rama would have us believe. The fact that margarine has been able to position itself as a healthy food despite preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers and flavour enhancers is partly thanks to its successful marketing strategy.
As margarine also owes its success to the price factor and is well able to defend the myth of the healthier fat, butter has only one USP to beat the competition: the added value of the natural product. No margarine can dispute this product characteristic. This is why naturalness should also be the linchpin of a new campaign.
By Heart's concept already does justice to this positioning with its new claim: instead of using the phrase "everything in butter" as before, it profiles butter as "a natural talent". This is just the beginning of the rediscovered desire for natural products.
By Heart CD Hans Siegwart and his team asked themselves whether the popular Butterfrau could be continued at all, and if so, in what way. They characterized the previous butterwoman as a young, modern and somewhat edgy user. Although she had emancipated herself from the original farmer's wife to agent to quizmaster's wife, she remained the only focal point of the campaign.
Stabilize butter sales with Arnold and Rousseau?
For the new campaign, the creatives and strategists envisioned a brand world that translates naturalness in multiple dimensions and appeals to the viewer's desires: pristine surroundings captured photographically by artist Katrin Freisager in natural colors and freshness. The butter woman is no longer just a user. She becomes a symbolic figure for naturalness par excellence.
This symbolic figure can also be replaced by other people, Siegwart continues. "We didn't come up with Sarina Arnold because she is the most famous model in Switzerland. Rather, we asked ourselves the question: who could play Änneli in a new Gotthelf adaptation?" The charisma of the Uri native, her connection to her homeland and her dialect met expectations in the casting.
SMP wants to effectively counter the competition with the original brand world of the four TV commercials and three advertisements. The positioning of naturalness is followed by a gleeful comparison in the second spot, in which the butter woman drives grazing cows into flight by reading the margarine additives. The third and fourth commercials refer to Christmas and later Easter specialties, which taste more natural and therefore better with butter.
"Although we have developed very natural designs, we have moved away from the smell of cowsheds and are presenting a fashionable butter woman that also appeals to the young target group, where true values such as naturalness are back in fashion," Siegwart is convinced.
For the premium butter Floralp, By Heart chose a reduced brand world consisting of the product and trademark Enzian. The spots dramatize the genuine beauty and taste of a butter sandwich with honey or dried meat.
In addition to the striking, culinary visual opulence, which borrows from the grand hotel world, and the playful "food ballet" to a classical soundtrack, the new claim "Grand Beurre Suisse" underlines the claim to the highest quality. This high quality is rounded off in the advertisement subjects with ironic lists of places such as St. Moritz, Crans Montana, Gstaad, Davos and Rümlang.
Nothing is in butter anymore. Although ACNielsen has noted a slight increase in sales in the Swiss retail trade over the past twelve months, only a fraction is sold through this channel. The Butter Industry Organization (BOB) paints a less favorable picture. According to this organization, the Swiss consumed just under 4,500 tons of butter in processed or natural form in 2001. That is 4.8 percent less than in the previous year.
While Heinrich Geissbühler, treasurer of BOB, stated in Schweizer Bauer that "a butter mountain is not to be expected at the moment", BOB Managing Director Peter Ryser came to the opposite conclusion in Facts: "If we cannot significantly increase milk fat sales, we will have a butter mountain at the end of the year." Ryser expects the surplus to grow to around 8,000 tons by the end of the milk year (April 2003) and cost a good CHF 80 million. Does liberalized agriculture not function according to the laws of the free market economy after all?
Margarine just melts a little faster than butter
The only thing that is certain is that the reduction in milk quotas envisaged by the SMP has no legal basis and is therefore dependent on the goodwill of the farmers. And that the thirst is too small to drink away the milk produced. The problem is exacerbated by the trend towards low-fat dairy products.
Because producers pay 0.52 centimes per kilo of milk delivered and the federal government pays a maximum of the same amount for marketing measures, the advertising budget has remained constant at best in recent years. This is in stark contrast to the broad impact of the advertising campaigns of various margarine brands and private labels, not to mention the cumulative advertising pressure.
They benefited from the debate about animal versus vegetable fats and exploited this position in their favor. Margarine advertising consistently conveys the image of the vital consumer, whose outward appearance suggests a conscious diet and enviable health, as the testimonial appearances from Lätta to Becel or the family idyll of Rama would have us believe. The fact that margarine has been able to position itself as a healthy food despite preservatives, stabilizers, emulsifiers and flavour enhancers is partly thanks to its successful marketing strategy.
As margarine also owes its success to the price factor and is well able to defend the myth of the healthier fat, butter has only one USP to beat the competition: the added value of the natural product. No margarine can dispute this product characteristic. This is why naturalness should also be the linchpin of a new campaign.
By Heart's concept already does justice to this positioning with its new claim: instead of using the phrase "everything in butter" as before, it profiles butter as "a natural talent". This is just the beginning of the rediscovered desire for natural products.
By Heart CD Hans Siegwart and his team asked themselves whether the popular Butterfrau could be continued at all, and if so, in what way. They characterized the previous butterwoman as a young, modern and somewhat edgy user. Although she had emancipated herself from the original farmer's wife to agent to quizmaster's wife, she remained the only focal point of the campaign.
Stabilize butter sales with Arnold and Rousseau?
For the new campaign, the creatives and strategists envisioned a brand world that translates naturalness in multiple dimensions and appeals to the viewer's desires: pristine surroundings captured photographically by artist Katrin Freisager in natural colors and freshness. The butter woman is no longer just a user. She becomes a symbolic figure for naturalness par excellence.
This symbolic figure can also be replaced by other people, Siegwart continues. "We didn't come up with Sarina Arnold because she is the most famous model in Switzerland. Rather, we asked ourselves the question: who could play Änneli in a new Gotthelf adaptation?" The charisma of the Uri native, her connection to her homeland and her dialect met expectations in the casting.
SMP wants to effectively counter the competition with the original brand world of the four TV commercials and three advertisements. The positioning of naturalness is followed by a gleeful comparison in the second spot, in which the butter woman drives grazing cows into flight by reading the margarine additives. The third and fourth commercials refer to Christmas and later Easter specialties, which taste more natural and therefore better with butter.
"Although we have developed very natural designs, we have moved away from the smell of cowsheds and are presenting a fashionable butter woman that also appeals to the young target group, where true values such as naturalness are back in fashion," Siegwart is convinced.
For the premium butter Floralp, By Heart chose a reduced brand world consisting of the product and trademark Enzian. The spots dramatize the genuine beauty and taste of a butter sandwich with honey or dried meat.
In addition to the striking, culinary visual opulence, which borrows from the grand hotel world, and the playful "food ballet" to a classical soundtrack, the new claim "Grand Beurre Suisse" underlines the claim to the highest quality. This high quality is rounded off in the advertisement subjects with ironic lists of places such as St. Moritz, Crans Montana, Gstaad, Davos and Rümlang.
