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> BRANDED
’
have to have a strong functional bedrock to the brand, which is
great taste, great performance, ease of delivery and ease of
preparation. When you go into a new market the emotive
aspects won’t be as high and you have to try to build the brand
up around these functional aspects.”
As a result, brand building in the UK was largely events-
focused, such as in-store promotions and PR-driven events. “In
the early stages we were focused on trying to get the brand into
people’s hands to give them the opportunity to try it against
their normal brand, and then build a reputation for being strong
in that area because of the taste.”
Advertising didn’t make sense because distribution isn’t
national in the UK, according to Noonan. Flahavan’s is stocked
It became important for us
in Tesco, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Waitrose and Wholefoods. “We
wouldn’t yet be equally distributed across Morrison stores. The
to have a clear understanding
cost would be enormous if we were to engage in advertising;
of what the emotive and
the strategy that’s emerging has more to do with PR. That’s not
to say that we may get to a point where we’ll look at forms of
functional aspects of the
advertising.
“The UK market is 13 times the size of the Irish market, which
brand are. When you go into a represented a big opportunity for us. When we researched it,
new market the emotive
we realised it was more convenience focused than the domes-
tic market and that this was likely to come down the road to us
aspects won’t be as high and
in Ireland at some stage,” he says. “Our experience in the UK
you have to try to build the
helped us to be early experimenters in understanding how the
convenience segment worked. We actually introduced a couple
brand up around these
of smaller products into the UK before bringing them to Ireland
– the spiral bound drum and the microwave pots.”
functional aspects’ Apart from the UK, Flahavan’s is currently selling into France,
the Middle East and Spain and exports make up 20pc of over-
all sales. The internet is likely to play more of a role in terms of
marketing in the future, continues Noonan.
“We are looking at entering the US market, so having a web-
site that answers people’s queries about the brand is important.
The difficulty is it can’t be commercial because selling products
with low retail value and relatively high weight wouldn’t make
sense. The solution will be to make the products available in the
US. We would be the only truly authentic Irish oatmeal on offer,
so there could be a real opportunity for us. We are also leaning
towards using social media to drive interest in the brand in the
US,” he says.
32 Marketing Age Volume 4 Issue 1 2010
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