Robertson`s Jam

Mark Ritson on Branding
Premier gets out of a jam
The demise of Robertson’s may have upset some, but there is no longer any room for sentiment
J
ames Robertson launched
his family jam business in
1864, after his wife, Marion,
began making marmalade
at their local shop in Paisley.
Jams and mincemeat
followed, and Robertson’s became the
leading brand of British preserves for
most of the 20th century. Premier
Foods acquired the Robertson’s brand
last year when it swallowed up RHM.
This week Premier announced its new
strategy for its prized jam acquisition in
2009 – kill it. Quick.
By the end of next year, Robertson’s
will have disappeared forever from
British tables. Cue an avalanche of
media stories about the fall of another
great British institution, letters to the
Daily Mail about the end of society as
we know it, and a long line of generic
brand consultants, shaking their heads
and offering insight on where it all went
wrong and how the brand could ­– and
should – have been saved.
Don Williams, chief executive of
brand ID consultants Pi Global, was
especially emotional, telling The Grocer,
‘The decline of Robertson’s has been a
particularly sad affair. This once-great,
iconic British brand has, in my view,
been systematically dismantled.’
You need a new dance, Don – the
music has changed. Ten years ago, the
Robertson’s story might have been one
of strategic error, but the world of
branding is changing faster than many
industry experts can keep up with.
Consider the dire straits companies
such as Premier Foods find themselves
in. The once-mighty food group may
be only months away from a fin­ancial
melt­down. How would you feel if you
owed 10 times more than you were
worth and the bank was ringing you to
come in for a chat? That’s the dilemma
for Premier, which has a market capital­
isation of £150m and debts of more
than £1.6bn. Its prior­ity is to reduce its
debt and streamline its business before
its bankers shut it down. Killing brands,
particularly when your portfolio
includes similar, stronger offerings,
such as Hartley’s Jam, makes more
sense than trying to maintain double
the marketing and production costs.
Also, consider the market. Yes,
Robertson’s is the number-three brand
in a category led by Hartley’s. If this
were 1995, we would run both brands
and have a fantastic business. But it’s
2008 and the maxim of ‘don’t be caught
in the middle’ applies to jam, as much
as other recession-ravaged categories.
On top are the super-premium jams
such as Bonne Maman and Tiptree,
both of which have enjoyed doubledigit annual growth for years. Below are
the private-label jams that have grown
from nothing to now account for a
third of the total value of the category.
Consumers are either clinging to life’s
little luxuries and trading up, or saving
a few valuable pence and trading down.
Either way, they are deserting the
middle ground. Time to kill the weaker
brand, and focus Premier’s limited
resources on the stronger leader brand.
Marketers must wake up and smell
the napalm. The world of brand strat­
egy has changed completely in the past
six months, but many of you are still
living in 2007, when we launched
brands, marketing budgets were full
and companies had seemingly unlimit­
ed sums of money. All that is gone, and
not coming back any time soon.
Anyone who even suggests launching
a new brand, especially in retail, in 2009
should be taken out into the car park
and ‘retrenched’. Killing is the new
creating. The only way to build value
in the year ahead is to destroy weak
brands. Marketers must now put down
their paintbrushes and learn to love the
knife. Throw away the little Buddha
statue on your office PC, and put up a
poster of the great god Shiva!
‘The world of
brand strategy
has changed
completely in
the past six
months’
Mark Ritson is an associate professor of
marketing, and consultant to some of the
world’s leading brands
30 seconds on... preserves, gravy and the great god Shiva
n‘Jam’ is an Arabic word
meaning ‘close packed’ or
‘all together’. Jam has held
a central place in British
cooking since the earliest
records. In 15th-century
cookery journals such as
A Book of Cookrye — a sort
of Jamie Oliver of its time —
the medieval prose refers at
one point to a ‘drie
marmalade of peaches’.
20 Marketing 10 December 2008 nAs well as owning both the
Shiva name means both ‘auspicious’ and ‘world-destroyer’
Robertson’s and Hartley’s
brands, Premier Foods also
manufactures Rose’s
Marmalades and jam under
the Weight Watchers label.
The company is also a major
producer of private-label
jams in the UK.
nNext up on the Premier
chopping block could be OXO,
sales of which have declined
significantly. The addition of
market leader Bisto, which
has six times the sales of
OXO, to Premier’s portfolio
could spell the end of the
road for the iconic brand.
nThe god Shiva is known as
the ‘destroyer of the world’.
In Hindu religion, he is seen
as a force for death, but also
for shedding old habits and
clearing the way for a rebirth.
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