Innocent Awards Smaller

Marketing Society Awards For Excellence
Cause related marketing

Cause-related marketing
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This is the story of how cause related marketing is no longer a feel-good
nice to have, but is becoming a growth opportunity.
Innocent. The ultimate entrepreneurial brand. The paradigm of marketing
cool in the 90s and 00s won the hearts of Generation X with grass-covered
vans, festivals & the bananaphone…
But Gen X grew up and had kids, and innocent became a mummy brand.
How could we attract the new generation of hipster Millennials?
While Gen X wanted to have a good time, Millennials were more attracted
to brands with purpose. Luckily for innocent its founders had been partying
entrepreneurs with a conscience. Innocent was one of the first brands to
have a cause baked into its business model.
A brand with a mission to ‘Leave the world better than we found it’, that has
given 10% of its profits to charity since the year it was born.
Weirdly, not many people knew this. But luckily it was exactly the right
message for Millennials.
So innocent was repositioned as the brand that not only tastes good, but
does good, to you, your body, and the world beyond you.
Every time you twist the cap, a chain of good starts.
We partnered up with some of the charities that innocent has helped over
the years to tell the story of ‘The Chain of Good’.
Already market share is up 1.2% and we have reversed a long-term decline in
brand measures, connecting with a new audience, and deepening the love of
our current drinkers.
This was more than a cause related campaign, it was the re-launch of a
cause driven brand. Good all round.
Innocent: the story of
the chain of good
Word count: 274

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1. THINGS WERE AMAZING
One day in 1998, three blokes turned up to a music festival
with £500 of fruit and a sign saying “should we give up
our jobs to make smoothies?” They put out a “yes” bin and
a “no” bin and at the end of the day, the “yes” bin was full.
Innocent, Britain’s favourite little drinks company, is a
brand famed for its entrepreneurial energy and for making
people smile. A company with innovation at its core that
single-handedly formed the smoothie category in the UK
and created a tone of voice that’s now mimicked by many.
Its approach to communications also broke with
convention (at that point, not many brands considered
packaging to be as important as a press ad), and the
brand’s quirky personality – with its grass-covered vans,
festivals and bananaphone – was infectious. In short,
everybody adored innocent.
But 17 years later, the picture had started to look less sunny...

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2. BUT TROUBLE LAY AHEAD
The business landscape looked bleak, and sales had started to slide.
In a more competitive drinks landscape, crowded with a range of
new options often at a lower price point, it became harder for
innocent to compete.
They had also suffered in the sugar debate, despite the fact their
little drinks were made with nothing but fruit.
People just weren’t drinking as many smoothies, and the market
began to shrink.
Innocent’s amazing brand
image lost some of its shine.
Despite its quirky personality,
and innovative marketing
history, innocent had become
reliant on rational product
advertising, focussing on ‘2 of
your 5 a day’. Unsurprisingly,
people had started to find the
brand less engaging.
“We were building a category, justifying the fact that there was
now this bit in the chilled aisle of supermarkets marked ‘smoothies’.
We had to somehow keep people coming back there, so we kept
telling them why, with umpteen product-led messages. I’m very
proud of those ads, but we rarely deviated from the bottle/fruit/
park format.”
Dan Germain, Group Head of Brand and Creative at innocent
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is a brand I trust
Source: Millward Brown Tracking. Shifts measured from Mar 2011 – Dec 2013 pre-campaign
%

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3. THEY’D LOST THE YOUTH
The target audience had changed.
In the 90s and 00s, innocent was considered to be a pretty
cool brand: fun-loving 20-somethings knew they could
party hard and still feel good with innocent. But as our
drinkers grew up, innocent became a brand for the yummy
mummy and failed to connect with the next set of
20-somethings: Millennials.
While Gen X wanted to just party and have a good time,
Millennials are drawn more to brands with a sense of purpose
and authenticity. Innocent, with its history of rational,
product-led comms, wasn’t capturing their imagination
in the same way. We needed to find a way to recruit the
next generation of Millennials.
innocent Fruitstock, 2006

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4. WE NEEDED TO GO BACK
TO THE START
In order to do this, we knew we needed to go back to the
very beginning of innocent and soak up all we could about
the brand. Innocent knew there was much more to say to
people; there were so many unsung stories to share and
celebrate. So they invited us to spend time at Fruit Towers.
After days of smoothie-drinking, toast-eating and white
coat-wearing, we left Fruit Towers with notebooks packed
with wonderful stories and a deep affection for the brand.

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5. WHO ARE INNOCENT?
Innocent’s founders wanted to create a product that would
make life easier and better for people. And from this
intention sprang their two brand mantras:
Inside Fruit Towers
1. Help people to live well and die old
2. Always leave things better than you found them.
This told us that innocent is a mission before profit brand,
guided by a sense of purpose that dictates everything in
their business. For innocent, going to extreme lengths to
source the best fruit, creating strong, long-term relationships
with their suppliers and being committed to finding the most
sustainable packaging are not CSR afterthoughts, they’re
baked into the business model.
What’s particularly special about innocent is that ever
since they began, 10% of their profits have gone to charity.
In 2004, they set up the innocent foundation, which funds
projects in the UK and all over the world,.
Behind all the bunting was a genuine cause-related business,
something it had been from the day its doors opened. But as
much as innocent wanted to talk about it in comms, research
had previously suggested that this wouldn’t be a motivating
enough message to drive sales.

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6. GETTING TO A PLATFORM
These deep-rooted ethical credentials along with the
irreverent personality of the brand made for a unique yin and
yang. We wanted to get these cause related stories across
whilst continuing to let people know that innocent make
tasty little drinks that are good for you. So we needed a
platform that would allow all three messages - taste, health
and ethics – to shine.
Just as when God created the world he felt good (Genesis
1:31) everything innocent create is about good. Good for the
tastebuds, good for your body and good for others too.
Goodness is the thing that touches every part of their
business, everything from the company culture to the Big
Knit. It was no longer about emotional vs rational advertising,
it just had to communicate goodness.
So we positioned innocent as the brand that ‘Tastes Good,
Does Good’. Every time someone twists the cap, good
things happen. It’s a platform that accommodated both the
personality and the purpose; something that would empower
our drinkers to feel good. A platform that would also help to
solve the price perception problem. With innocent you get
way more than you do with any other drink.
We wanted to bring this platform to life and champion
innocent’s cause related nature by telling real stories of real
people, and we realised that this was the perfect opportunity
to hero the amazing work of the innocent foundation’s
charity partners.

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7. WHAT IS THE INNOCENT
FOUNDATION?
The innocent foundation was set up in 2004 to give grants to new
entrepreneurial charities working all over the world to help the world’s
hungry. All of the innocent foundations charity partners share the same
core principles of sustainable progress - and work to help put communities
on a sustainable path to a better life. Overall, the foundation has given
over £1.9m to 47 projects around the world 1
.
In developing our campaign, we came across so many inspiring stories
but were only able to choose two. Eventually, we decided to tell the
stories of Ravelina and Practical Action in Peru and Janet & Otai and
Send a Cow in Uganda.
Practical Action, Peru
Practical Action use technology to help poor communities make
practical and sustainable improvements to their lives.
For our film, we travelled to Peru to meet Ravelina. Practical Action
provided her with a solar panel, which gave her home electricity and
enabled her to power her electric spinner. This allowed her to make
more wool to sell at the market, which in turn helped her to support
her family.
“The innocent foundation has supported Practical Action’s work in Peru
since 2007 when they funded our project providing water, sanitation
and energy to communities in the high Andes, 5,000m above
sea level. Who would have thought that drinking an innocent
strawberry and banana smoothie could make such a difference?”
Liz Frost, Trust Officer at Practical Action.
1
Innocent foundation website Feb 2015.

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Send a Cow, Uganda
Send a Cow provide poor families in Africa with the knowledge and
skills to secure their own sustainable futures from the land.
For our film, we chose to tell the story of Joseph. Joseph’s parents,
Janet and Otai were struggling farmers from Kumel village in Ngora.
After joining Send A Cow in 2008, Janet & Otai started making money
from selling milk and crops and found themselves able to afford school
fees. Their increased earnings even afforded them the opportunity to
buy Joseph a bike so that he could travel to the best school 10km away
where he would get the kind of education that would set him up to
become an engineer.
“We are delighted for the support we have received from the innocent
foundation over the years and it is great to see the results of this support
on film. Every penny we receive makes a vital difference to families like
Joseph’s and we are delighted to see children get a much needed education
which will break the cycle of poverty for good.”
Martin Geake, Chief Executive, Send a Cow.
The campaign put both charities on a global stage by being mentioned
in not only all of innocent’s social media channels but also Max Joseph’s
(our famous director) and MTV’s.

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8. THE CAMPAIGN IDEA
– THE CHAIN OF GOOD
The Chain of Good simply illustrates how one good thing can lead to
another when you choose an innocent smoothie. The film shows a
regular bloke, Mark, doing ‘the lunchtime dance of indecision’ when
deciding what to drink with his lunch. But this simple act of choosing an
innocent smoothie triggers a chain of good that, unknowingly to Mark,
reaches the other side of the globe.
The Chain of Good ran as a through-the-line campaign, with outdoor,
digital and experiential activity. The outdoor visually brought to life the
chain of good concept with a number of posters that linked various
innocent messages together.
We knew we couldn’t just talk about The Chain of Good, we had to
actually do it. So we helped people feel good by pumping up their
bicycle tyres and cheering them up with Mariachi bands on their way
to work. We also gave away two smoothies to each passer-by so they
could continue The Chain of Good by giving a smoothie to a friend.

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9. RESULTS
Tastes Good Does Good is a long-term brand investment only at the
beginning of its journey, but already there are green shoots of recovery.
Not only did we manage to engage Millennials, but attitudes to the
brand improved across the board.
‘Is a brand I trust’ + 5%
‘Has a premium quality’ +5%
We had also made them feel good.
‘Makes me feel good about myself’ +4%. In particular the younger
Millenial audience were more likely to agree with this statement (Under
35s +5% index 150 vs over 35s)
Critically we had also managed to turn around value perceptions.
‘Worth what it costs +4%
All these shifts were statistically significant 2
.
And we shifted more than just attitudes…
In the 12 weeks following the campaign, market share increased from
54% to 55.2%3
, despite the category as a whole seeing a decline.
We’ve created a new cause related platform to future proof the brand.
A new consumer-facing brand promise that takes pride of place on the bottle.
2
Millward Brown Tracking 2014. Shifts measured from
December 2013 pre campaign to April 2014 post campaign.
3
Nielson: Smoothies only
Source: www.innocentdrinks.co.uk/the-innocent-promise

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10. A WORD ON THE GOOD
PEOPLE OF FRUIT TOWERS
The campaign also had a notable impact to the people inside Fruit
Towers. One of innocent’s Creative Directors said: “In 81/2
years, this
campaign was the first time an agency had come in and made everyone
excited about something. Universally excited.”
“I’m as proud as can be of the work we’ve done with 101. We’re telling
the best true stories about our business, and about the positive impact
it can have on people who really need support and help. It’s been truly
collaborative, between us, 101, Max Joseph (our esteemed director), and
the NGOs and charities that we work with. A proper ‘Chain of Good’.”
Dan Germain, Group Head of Brand and Creative, innocent.
11. WHAT WE CAN LEARN
Today, communicating ethical credentials is more than being seen to do
the right thing. It’s a brand behaviour that is core to the belief system of
the Millennial generation. Brands that Taste Good and Do Good, Feel Good.
Building an authentic brand with purpose can be commercially viable.
Being cause related is no longer an ethical exercise, it is a business
necessity, a growth opportunity and can have a significant impact on
the bottom line.
Word count: 2,013

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