Feature: Pitchers of innocence

For a relatively small company, Innocent has made a huge impact with its promotions. In both experiential marketing and on-pack, it has shown creativity that has earned it both awards and sales.

Its latest promotional campaign exploits consumer concern about carbon emissions and reinforces the brand’s positioning as being “100 per cent natural”. “Buy One Get One Tree” provides customers with a unique code on packs which they input online in return for a pledge from Innocent that it will donate money to plant a tree in India and Africa. As well as collecting customer data, it drives people to the brand’s engaging website.

The objective is to get over 100,000 trees planted, and, two weeks after the launch at the start of October, it had reached nearly 5,000. Co-founder Richard Reed emphasises how the promotion highlights Innocent’s corporate social responsibility, from using sustainable packaging to sourcing ingredients ethically. “Our vision in this area is to contribute to global cooling, not warming, by reducing our use of natural resources throughout the whole business,” he says.

The latest on-pack promotion is running across leading supermarkets, reflecting Innocent’s growing domination of the smoothie market since its launch eight years ago. It now has 68 per cent market share of a category that it pretty much created, and a 15 per cent share of the chilled juice category. Revenue has been doubling annually, with turnover reaching £78 million last year.

This growth is reflected in its most successful promotional campaign to date, Project Supergran, which encouraged the nation to knit little woollen hats to go on bottles. In return, Innocent donated 50p to Age Concern and Extra Care for each unit sold. As well as winning the Grand Prix at the ISP Awards in 2005, it raised £12,000 for the charities, surpassing its 20,000-hat target by 4,000, and boosted Innocent’s sales by 10 per cent.

Created in-house, the campaign in autumn 2004 had one small retail partner, the 40-strong Eat chain of cafés. By 2006, it also had Sainsbury’s on board and raised £115,000 with 230,000 hats. Now rechristened The Big Knit, it has been relaunched for 2007 with the target of 400,000 hats and raising £200,000 for Age Concern through sales in Sainsbury’s.

Innocent has also recognised the value of experiential marketing from its early days. After running its first Fruitstock music festival in 2003, it rebranded this year as the Innocent Village Fete as part of a £1.5 million experiential campaign developed by agency Sledge. The two-day festival attracted 55,000 people to Regent’s Park in August, with attractions including welly-wanging and duck-herding.

In a campaign by experiential agency Because, Innocent transformed shopping centres and railway stations into a rural setting with real turf, the natural smell of grass, displays of fresh produce and picnic-style seating. Tying in with the brand’s above-the-line creative of packs nestling in grass, it helped to further differentiate the brand in the increasingly crowded juice and health drink category.

With new products coming on to the market, such as Tesco’s own-brand smoothies in September, Innocent’s promotional marketing is helping maintain a distinctive brand personality that ensures it towers above the other smoothie saplings.