The brand is Bumble Bee, sold by the Bumble Bee Foods unit of Lion Capital, which is beginning a foray into frozen foods with a line of products called Bumble Bee SuperFresh — full name, Bumble Bee SuperFresh Premium Fresh Frozen.
A campaign to promote Bumble Bee SuperFresh, which started this month, has a budget estimated at $25 million. That is a significant investment for a company that had no measured ad spending in major media last year and only $79,000 in 2011, the Kantar Media division of WPP reported.
The largest recent advertising outlay by Bumble Bee Foods, according to Kantar Media, was $4.5 million, back in 2009.
The size of the budget for the campaign indicates how important it is to executives at Bumble Bee Foods, which is known for tuna, salmon and shrimp products that are sold in pouches as well as cans.
Among the elements of the campaign for Bumble Bee SuperFresh are a commercial, which can be watched on television, on a special Bumble Bee SuperFresh Web site and on YouTube; radio spots; advertisements in magazines that include Food Wine, InStyle and Real Simple; ads on Web sites; coupon inserts in newspapers; digital efforts that include search engine optimization; and a public relations initiative by FleishmanHillard, part of the Omnicom Group.
The creative agency for the Bumble Bee SuperFresh campaign is Lotas Patton New York, which goes by L.P.N.Y. The creative approach is in the vein known on Madison Avenue by the term “product as hero,” which is common when bringing out a new product.
There are six products in the Bumble Bee SuperFresh line: two salmon, two shrimp and two tilapia. Retail prices are around $8.99 or $9.99 for each package.
In keeping with the “Premium” part of the full brand name, the items bear descriptions like Salmon With Garlicky Black Pepper and Extra Virgin Olive Oil; Tilapia With Lemon, Pepper and Herbs; and Spicy Shrimp Romesco.
To underline the upscale image, the ads and packages are colored in black, gold and red and use phrases like “Perfection every time” and “Wine-worthy seafood.”
An official-looking seal appears on the packages and in the ads, proclaiming, “Cleaned, cut and fresh frozen within hours.”
And the commercial presents a gaggle of trendy types — the men are scruffy, the women are stylish — gathered for a dinner party around a table laden with food and opened bottles of wine. They seem to be the kind of people who would not sing the long-running “Yum, yum” ad jingle for Bumble Bee tuna unless it was in a knowing, retro-chic vein.
“Ah, the delicate flake of tilapia with garlic, the savory succulence of salmon with garden pesto, lemon shrimp with herbs” an announcer says at the start of the commercial. “Presenting a delicious difference, new Bumble Bee SuperFresh Premium Fresh Frozen.”
The announcer goes on to praise the new product line as “chef-prepped with all-natural ingredients,” “gluten free” and made with “no preservatives, ever.”
It is a far cry from the prosaic realm of canned tuna, and purposely so.
“It’s clearly a big departure for us,” says Chris Lischewski, chief executive at Bumble Bee Foods in San Diego.
After “quite a bit of cost inflation” recently in tuna, which has begun to affect sales volume, executives wanted to look at “where else does the Bumble Bee brand have to play,” he adds.
“We talked to over 28,000 consumers” in conducting “the most extensive research we’ve ever done,” Mr. Lischewski says, and found a “gap in the premium frozen seafood segment” of the food market, as illustrated by the inability of those consumers, when prompted, to come up with the name of a brand in that segment.
There are reasons for that vacuum, Mr. Lischewski acknowledges.
“Two-thirds of seafood is eaten outside the home,” he says, because many consumers are unfamiliar with cooking seafood at home.
And those who do cook seafood at home complain about the smell, he adds, or the cleanup afterward.
So in developing Bumble Bee SuperFresh, one goal was to “start with three species” that consumers are “familiar and comfortable with,” Mr. Lischewski says, referring to salmon, shrimp and tilapia.
Other goals included making the products easy to prepare and eschewing ingredients like gums and preservatives, he adds.
The decision to call the new products Bumble Bee SuperFresh stems from a recognition that the Bumble Bee brand name “brings trust,” Mr. Lischewski says. “People know we know seafood.”
“We found that’s especially important in something like seafood,” he adds, because “having a brand you trust gets them over the initial hurdle” of unfamiliarity and then “the product does the rest.”
To distinguish the new frozen items from the shelf-stable Bumble Bee products in cans and pouches, the word SuperFresh was added to the brand name.
It “really resonated with the consumer,” Mr. Lischewski says, and “putting both together gave us the best opportunity for success.”
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Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/24/business/media/marketer-has-new-bee-in-its-bonnet-frozen-meals.html?partner=rss&emc=rss