Background

Sarson’s are the leading vinegar brand in the UK. We have been a British cupboard staple since 1794, becoming an integral part of the country’s culinary heritage.

Against the backdrop of the cost-of-living crisis in 2023, we were seeing a trend towards lower quality private label swapping. In addition to this, the brand has been losing relevance with younger generations. Tastes and competition for their palates has shifted, meaning that Sarson’s needs to work hard to create new fans of the product.

We needed a plan to reignite the love for this Great British brand and cement our position in cupboards for another 230 years and beyond.

Insight & Strategy

YouGov recently discovered that the younger the generation, the less likely they are to favour a fish & chip takeaway - they would much prefer pizza. Digging into this further, Sarson’s uncovered a shocking statistic:

‘In the next two years, half of all chips shops in the UK are at risk of closing if we don’t take action’

We believed that we could depend on the Great British Public to turn this around. Small action would make a big difference. Just taking two extra trips to the chippy this year would halt the decline, so we set about our mission to save this important part of our nation’s identity. We must do our bit to help the chippy community, after all fish & chips isn’t fish & chips without Sarson’s.

The strategy for Sarson’s Malt Vinegar is simple: Respect the chippies that respect our chips. The cause-led campaign was something Sarson’s really believed in; understanding that this big task required bold action. This led us to concentrate on a key moment supporting National Fish & Chips Day in June, where we would launch our campaign within the country’s most ubiquitous commuter paper - Metro.

The Metro wrap boasts up to 3.3m visibility (1.8m actual readers), it’s mid-market and its readership is younger than most newspapers - exactly who we’re trying to win over. We appreciate the power of national news brands and their role in bringing about social change.

We harnessed this by creating an unmissable national moment, highlighting the plight of our beloved chippies and spurring the country into conversion and action.

We needed to ensure each element of communications was working together, the sum being greater than its parts. Alongside Bicycle, Wonderhood were on the duty to form bold and eye-catching creative, W Communications would extend our message through PR and Jellybean would assist the chippies themselves, through trade activations.

Plan

The centrepiece of the campaign was the mouth-watering Sarson’s National Metro cover wrap which we used to drive the biggest portion of the reach and awareness for the campaign.

We leant heavily into the history of the medium, harking back to the days when your chippy tea used to be wrapped in newsprint. On our outside cover “the fish and chips are printed completely to scale to make commuters feel like the fish and chips are really there, complete with Sarson’s splashes and cooking oil bleeding through”. This was accompanied by big and bold type reading ‘Save Your Chippy’.

On the inside, more of the story is revealed with information explaining the situation and what we can do about it. A competition was included to help chippies urging consumers to ‘do your bit & win free chips’, giving away free chips every Friday from June 2023 until February 2024.

To compliment we also leveraged a full homepage takeover of the Metro’s online page. This used the same imagery and messaging to ensure consistency, catching the readers that don’t commute but still read the Metro, increasing our overall reach.

The final element was social activity implemented on both Meta and Tiktok to drive reach, attention and interaction with the brand. These would run for a longer period to maintain interest in the movement throughout that peak summer period.

Meta was used as an extension of print using the same messaging and focussed on the older demographic. On TikTok we created entertaining native ads for a younger demographic, exploiting the social currency on the app. Both drove users to find more information and take part in the Fryday competition.

Results

The campaign was a great success with a total 1.8m individuals reached through the Metro wrap and a further 536k coming from Metro online, in just one day. Recent research by the Metro indicates that the actual reach may have been as high as 4.2m.

Panel-based research showed that 79% of the exposed audience were unaware of the problem pre campaign and that readers had responded appreciating the Sarson’s were ‘doing their bit and encouraging others to do theirs’.

Our advert had a 90% recall, much higher than Metro’s 79% benchmark and the highest recall of any Metro advert in 2023 to date. It was deemed a ‘fresh’ approach by 71% of readers, also smashing the benchmark of 57%.

The Metro activity also helped drive fantastic earned coverage in other national and local press titles.

The Fryday competition was a sell-out. Sarson’s initiative hit capacity every day, meaning that we gave away 1 ton of chips, drove incremental customers to beleaguered chippies, and those happy customers were buying delicious, tangy Sarson’s to enjoy with those fish and chips.