Award-Winning Marketing Campaign Sees Strong Sales Results

Mackie’s sits as the best-selling ice cream in Scotland with 20+% market share and brand awareness of over 90%. Most of the company’s growth in recent years has come from its focus on consumers south of the border, where it is less well known by consumers. As well as landing multiple new national listings, Mackie’s has been on a marketing drive to increase its brand-awareness in England and Wales.

This summer, Mackie’s split its campaign goals by geography. For its Scottish heartland, the Perfect Pudding Partner campaign encouraged engagement, with a dessert decision tree recommending Mackie’s lovers new flavours to pair with their favourite puddings. South of the border, the goal was brand awareness – building trust and recognition, with a view to making new consumers more comfortable in trying Mackie’s for the first time. This drive saw Mackie’s launch its largest ever marketing campaign, incorporating ITV1, ITVx, STV, STVplayer, social, programmatic, radio and podcast advertising.

With brand-awareness and recognition in-aisle being the goal, the TV advert focussed on recurring inclusion of the Mackie’s tub while emphasising a variety of use occasions shown to be most popular with its consumers through market research. The channels and shows the advert played on were selected as those which indexed highest for Mackie’s focus consumer groups. Control regions were selected where no advertising was undertaken. Comparing sales data between the control regions and those where the advertising was shown demonstrates very strong results.

Areas which were shown the advert saw an average 23% increase in sales in stores over the course of the campaign, whereas the control regions saw an average uplift of 2%.

The campaign’s success has been recognised outside of the sales figures, too. We’re delighted to have been awarded The Grocer’s Top Campaign Award for 2023 in the ice cream category. The award is decided using a combination of data, which includes measurement of people’s emotional response to an advert, scoring adverts on their predicted long-term brand growth and short-term sales growth success, consumer recall of the adverts and their consideration of the brand. We’re delighted to have been recognised as a great example of a campaign this year, with our efforts and approach to increasing brand awareness and sales south of the border proving successful.

Combining all advertising elements, we have witnessed an 11% increase in penetration across the UK over the past year, which we plan to build upon with increased national listings and more marketing support.