Kraft Canada brought the brand to the airwaves after a nearly three-year absence, launching its first national advertising campaign in Canada. The ads feature the kind of high-end photography that used to be common to foodie publications and gourmet brands.
Cracker Barrel cheese is stuck in the middle. And not just when it comes to grilled cheese sandwiches.
The brand is not fancy enough for the deli case, where more expensive herbed goat cheeses and craggy blocks of parmigiano-reggiano live. But it commands a higher price than its neighbours in the dairy aisle. With harried shoppers increasingly making fast decisions that are largely based on price in that part of the store, Kraft Canada's biggest cheese brand needed to reinforce a message of quality.
So this week, the company brought the brand to the airwaves after a nearly three-year absence, launching its first national advertising campaign in Canada.
"Consumers will pay more for Cracker Barrel; we have that already. But increasingly, we're finding price-driven tactics have been driving some of the growth in the category," said Dan D'Alessandro, vice-president of marketing for cheese brands at Kraft Canada. "It's limiting our growth, and forcing us into lower prices than where we want to be. ... They're making this quick decision in-store, but it's probably because we're not making it easy for them either. We wanted to re-establish our equity with consumers."
The campaign represents a sort of relaunch for the brand: It has changed its packaging to use more quality food imagery, which is hitting store shelves now. The ads feature the kind of high-end photography that formerly was common to foodie publications and gourmet brands – but has recently been in use more widely by marketers such as Loblaw Cos. Ltd., Betty Crocker and Smucker's.
The ads, which will run on television and online, show the reverse-engineering of recipes such as lasagna and a steak sandwich with havarti, from completion backward through the cooking process, and the choice of a certain cheese product at their source.
To make the images particularly striking, the advertising agency Leo Burnett Toronto flew in London, U.K.-based food stylist Katie Giovanni. She worked on a similarly visceral campaign for the Lurpak brand of cooking products, which showed forests of cauliflower in extreme closeup, and time-lapse images of chickens plumping and souffles rising in the oven. The director, Rob Fiocca, is also a food photographer and shot the print ads.
"People have seen a lot of incredible food photography. We wanted to think of a breakthrough, new way to look at food," said Morgan Kurchak, creative group head at Leo Burnett. "We did a whole test day in the studio, because everything was going to be played in reverse, to find the things that had the most visual interest."
Cracker Barrel holds more than 25-per-cent market share of the block cheese category in Canada. But while more and more consumers have an interest in food, they are also busier than ever and are on autopilot in the dairy aisle, shopping quickly and not always based on brand love. Because of that, the brand, which Mr. D'Alessandro calls a "sleeping giant," needed to wake up and begin advertising again to hold on to that leading position.
The campaign will encompass print, online, social media and television, and will also support the launch of a line of shredded cheeses, which the brand has not sold before.
The company did rounds of "consumer ethnography" research, speaking with shoppers one on one in their homes, and found that many felt they were "eating to live" rather than "living to eat," even though they are passionate about food – whatever their level of culinary skill.
The advertising is attempting to play into the emotional side of food. It's a departure from conventional advertising in the category, including Cracker Barrel's, which tended to show happy families around a table, and to emphasize messages such as taste, convenience and ingredients.
"We're trying to show that brand choice is important," Mr. D'Alessandro said.
"We tried to make them very rich in sound as well as picture," Mr. Kurchak said, "to be emotional and evocative of really nice, luxe food moments."
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THE NUMBERS
3.6 per cent: Growth in sales in the "natural block cheese" category in Canada in the past 52 weeks, ended March 12, compared with the same period a year earlier.
64 per cent: Proportion of cheese in this category that consumers buy based on some sort of store promotion (such as flyer promotions, sales and other price reductions, or in-store displays).
25.4 per cent: Cracker Barrel's market share in branded block cheese, the largest in the category.
0.6: Cracker Barrel's growth in share points (based on sales dollars) in the past 52 weeks.
Source: AC Nielsen