Beginning this summer and into next year, consumers shopping at grocery stores will encounter a new experience in the soup isle. The Campbell Soup Co. has put the focus on selling more of its condensed soups in the U.S. by redefining the shopping experience, enhancing quality, offering healthier choices, refreshing packaging and launching new marketing initiatives.
The company spent months listening to consumers, photographing its various soups to visually define the ultimate comfort moment when a warm bowl of soup arrives on the kitchen table and rewriting its advertising and promotion. It employed New Age techniques like biometrics and ethnographics to measure consumer response to its soups, packaging and shopping experience and to go head-to-head against the simple meals category.
The result is a well-structured plan affecting more than 60% of the condensed soup line that will play out in soup isles at 24,000 grocery stores boosting a soup portfolio business that generated more than $1 billion in net sales in fiscal 2009.
“We are now in a position to reframe the way we compete in the broader simple meals category,” Douglas R. Conant, Campbell’s President and CEO, said, in a release. “Our new marketing efforts will further position soup as a key part of a healthy, well-balanced simple meal and help consumers make more informed choices. We will build on the success of our high-margin, market-leading condensed soup franchise—enhancing its quality, making it healthier and increasing its relevance.”
The familiar red and white colors on labels will remain, but changes to other visual elements will evoke a new and different way for consumers to think about Campbell’s condensed soup. The shelving systems at national retailers will be redesigned.
New ads will position soup and dishes made with soup as a simple meal. The campaign will highlight the fact that soups are an affordable, tasty and nourishing alternative versus several other popular simple meals. It will also promote the fact that the vegetables in “its soup are grown on American farms.
The new initiative improves on substantial investment Campbell’s has made over the last several years that have helped increase net sales of U.S. soup every year since 2003.
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