Frozen spuds are big business, particularly in a country renowned for its love of chips. In the UK, the frozen-potato category is worth more than £700m a year and continues to grow.

As Guinness is with stout and Heinz with ketchup, one brand stands out as synonymous with frozen potato in a wide variety of forms. That brand is, of course, McCain, still family-owned in an era of stock market-listed behemoths, and very much alive to new product development and marketing opportunities as it strives to stay ahead of supermarket own brands and other challengers.

Insight plays a central role in helping McCain keep its competitive edge. Laura Sutcliffe, marketing manager, insight and propositions, has been at the company for six years, and heads a four-strong team “dedicated to understanding what makes our customers and consumers tick”. While the team sits within marketing, it supports the whole commercial function of the business and is the champion of insight, making sure that it is part of everybody’s job.

The core McCain range – which spans chips, roast potatoes and products for kids, such as mashed-potato Unicorns and Smiles – is aimed squarely at the family market. In recent years, marketing activity has been developed on the back of insights into family teatime.

“It is something that happens day in, day out,” says Sutcliffe. “Every family does it. It is often quite chaotic – on the surface, from some of the verbatims we get back from parents when we talk to them about this occasion, it is, ‘crikey, midweek teas are just something I need to get through’. But when you dig deeper, there really is so much more to this occasion. There is so much powerful emotion; it’s where bonds and connections happen. It is when you’re together with the people you care about the most. You can be yourself, you can be supported – you feel safe in a way.”

For a number of years, McCain has worked closely with adam&eveDDB, which was recently named Agency of the Decade by advertising industry magazine Campaign for a run of high-profile successes, including the John Lewis Christmas ads. When adam&eveDDB began undertaking observational research with parents who represented various consumers, including watching them prepare and share tea with their families, two things stood out.

First, how the value of teatime as an occasion is often overlooked because it is an utterly familiar part of the daily routine – and yet it has emotional resonance and is important to people; and, second, that families don’t see themselves portrayed in the advertising they see. This finding is supported by Mintel research that showed almost half the UK population don’t think popular culture reflects the reality of modern families, while 84% of consumers couldn’t recall seeing anything that featured a family that looked like theirs.

“The more we talked to consumers, the more we realised the problem was that advertising tries to share this idealised, but also very averaged, view of what families are like,” says adam&eveDDB executive strategy director Nick Hirst. “That means we ignore, almost by definition, 90% of what families are like, and families come in all shapes and sizes. That is really the truth of it. That is what got us onto this thing of, if you are trying to show what families are really like, you have to show a much broader range of families than perhaps the advertising community has been showing.”

Adam&eveDDB used a recruitment agency to source participants for this exercise, with the whole team on the campaign visiting at least one family, and around six families visited. These insights were the genesis of the ‘We Are Family’ series of TV ads featuring a cast of real people chosen to reflect the diversity of modern British family life.

Participants had to be comfortable on camera and happy to be part of a broadcast advertising campaign, but – at the same time – couldn’t come across as ‘stagey’, as that would puncture the naturalism and authenticity desired.

The approach has proved successful, but one of the executions, featuring two dads and their baby son, hit the headlines after it triggered a wave of homophobic abuse on social media. Sutcliffe is quick to point out that the trolling came from a small minority and that it in no way affected McCain’s stance.

“It is our philosophy and commitment to remain representative of modern life and, as such, we have to stand by that,” she says. “We remain fully supportive of everybody who is part of our advertising and we have to make sure that we are responding to any negative press or feelings in the right way. It has not put anybody off; we are about championing diversity and being on everybody’s side.”

Celebrating difference

As the ‘We Are Family’ campaign evolved, McCain decided to shift the focus from diversity and differences between families, to acknowledging the diversity of viewpoints and differences within families.

Sutcliffe says: “It was important that we uncover, first hand, what families talk about at home and at mealtimes – how these differences emerge – and celebrate the emotional impact of these differences.”

McCain commissioned nationwide quantitative research from OnePoll, which surveyed 3,000 adults to uncover what families talk about at home and highlight the different opinions within households. The ‘Nation’s Conversations’ report, published in summer 2019, found that 90% of respondents claim to use dinner time as an opportunity to express differences in opinion on a large variety of issues. More than four-fifths ( 82%) of those surveyed agreed, or strongly agreed, that it’s a good thing for families to hold different views and sometimes disagree on things.

The work also involved qualitative research with families. McCain used commentary from this research in its 2019 ‘Differences’ commercial, narrated by Ricky Tomlinson, which sought to celebrate the emotional impact of differences in opinions and behaviour – again through the lens of mealtimes.

Hirst says the team knew they “had it right” when they showed an early script and a participant in a focus group “got quite animated, saying ‘yes, exactly; my friend is an adoptive parent and, finally, someone is making an ad that’s for her’”.

‘Nation’s Conversations’ is not seen as a one-off, but as an ongoing research index that aims to continue to observe, celebrate and better understand families. The thinking is to track ongoing conversations and uncover emerging important issues in families. Inevitably, the intra-family divides over the emotive issue of Brexit was one of the major issues highlighted by the first report, with 70% of respondents saying they had talked about it at the table, making it the main political topic of discussion.

The new advertising has delivered commercially and in terms of driving emotional resonance for the McCain brand; it has achieved 79% spontaneous brand awareness, according to Kantar brand tracking.

Subconscious approaches

Away from brand communications, the insight and propositions team supports new product development (NPD) and studies consumer shopping behaviour in real and simulated retail environments. This extends to accompanied shops, eye tracking and observing what draws attention at in-store fixtures. Tools such as QSR International’s NVivo are used to glean insight from qualitative data from a variety of sources.

Despite the greater use of technology to make sense of mixed-method data, Sutcliffe and her team still like to get out into the field when time allows. “Accompanied shop is really interesting because you get more of the qualitative and conversation behind the decisions they are making in that environment,” she says. “We don’t do them every week; we do them when we need to answer a specific question.”

Despite the “amazing methodologies” now available, Sutcliffe believes there is nothing more powerful than ethnography and stepping into the shoes of the consumer. She is fascinated by behavioural science – notably, some of the theories on heuristics outlined in Thinking, Fast and Slow by psychologist Daniel Kahneman.

Given the quickfire decision-making of supermarket shoppers, Sutcliffe is especially drawn to System 1 thinking: fast, subconscious, emotional choices. “I am quite interested whenever I see proposals back from agencies to see where, within their methodologies, they have got that kind of principle around System 1 responses from the consumer.”

On the NPD front, interpreting trends is a fundamental part of the team’s role. Knowledge of what people want now and in the future is applied to inform and inspire the business. Needless to say, the health and wellness trend has had an impact, most obviously with the successful launch of a lighter version of flagship product McCain Homechips.

Other waves ridden by McCain include the food-delivery boom. “In our time-pressured lives, there’s the need for immediacy and spontaneity,” says Sutcliffe. The company has launched a new proposition in this area – McCain SureCrisp – which it says will stay crispy for longer. It has also recently launched a range of cook-from-frozen snacks, aimed at consumers and the on-trade, to tap into the craft beer trend.

So while it will remain synonymous with chips, McCain is a brand looking to remain relevant to its shoppers – in all their glorious diversity – thanks to ongoing use of insight.

This article was first published in the April 2020 issue of Impact.