THE CHALLENGE
Isn't Iced tea Just Tea Gone cold with Lots of Sugar?
Non-alcoholic Ready To Drink Category: Trend Consumption Jan 07 to June 08
What do you do when 90% of Australian households refuse to try your category?
This was the challenge facing Nestea, the distant second in the Ready To Drink (RTD) Tea category.
The market leader at 70% of share, Lipton, had spent seven years and in excess of $35 million advertising its brand to Australians and inspite of it all, Iced Tea only accounted for 2% of all drinks sold in 2007.
Lipton Spend Source: Lipton Trade Presenter 2008.
The barrier to consumption was the perceived taste, the belief that Iced Tea is essentially hot tea gone cold.
Nestea had to change the rules of the game.
We anchored the brand in a powerful insight that energized Nestea's brand, differentiating it from Lipton and repositioned Iced Tea in the minds of both Australian consumers and at critical retail/trade levels.
ICED Tea RTD Category Pre-Campaign Market Share
BUSINESS OBJECTIVES
1. Grow Nestea's share of the category across all major channels.
Fosdstores from 4.5% to 7.5%
Convenience and petrol retailers from 16.7% to 25%
2. Exceed category growth throughout the period, from 18.7% to 40%.
3. Increase distribution and ranging from a total market average of by repositioning Nestea and the Iced Tea category in the minds of the trade.
THE SOLUTION
Our Opportunity
In 2007, current Tea drinkers were responsible for much of the growth in the Iced Tea category. People were slowly beginning
to consider the category and as such, consumption of Iced Tea in the home rose from 10.4%-11.5% at year end 2007.
The bigger prize that Nestea decided to pursue was the remaining 90% of Australian households that had never tried Nestea
Iced Tea before.
Driving trial became Nestea's strategic imperative.
By 2007, Lipton had become the category gorilla, a dominant force that ironically helped create the communications problem in the first place by leveraging the brand's equity and heritage in the hot tea, specialty category.
Building their message platform around the tagline “Tea can do that”, a benefits driven (eg: anti-oxidants) approach to Tea made sense for Lipton, but it also presented Nestea with a golden opportunity to make an impact and steal share in the Iced Tea category.
The arrival into the market of the iconic British tea brand Tetley only compounded the taste barrier issue as they too leveraged
their hot tea equity with a platform; “Tea on Ice, brought to you by Tetley”.
At 18.7% of the category, Nestea was suffering from competitors with significantly bigger media budgets who were essentially confusing Australians by leading with Tea cues and/or coming from a hot tea background.
Nestea had enough of bigger brands polluting the Iced Tea category with confusing hot tea gone cold orientated messaging and believed there was a greater opportunity to break through the category. We had to roll up our sleeves and get to work.
From “Yuck” to “Yum” in 30 Seconds
Nestea's challenge was to bring Iced Tea to the mainstream and we knew that a younger audience of 18–29 year old Australians would be open to trying something new as a change from their usual carbonated soft drinks of choice.
We found that at this life stage people are more open minded. They're on a journey of discovery, generally willing to embrace the latest and greatest especially if their peers had done so. We had to appeal to this mindset by encouraging them to have the confidence to give Iced Tea a go and make up their own minds.
So what was the key barrier that our communications needed to overcome?
