Secret code

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The butter category is historically quite flat, with little in the way of differentiation or innovation. That has started to change in recent years, however, as marketers latch onto concepts around authenticity, purity and taste in their branding. 

For Finnish dairy cooperative Valio, a Russian ban on imported milk products in 2014 – which widely affected the dairy industry in Europe – led to an opportunity. The company had been producing butter for more than 100 years, but now that its dairies were producing too much milk, it decided to expand internationally. 

“We started thinking about how we could distinguish our butter from other brands – because butter is pretty much the same around the world; there’s a very clear and strict definition of what it can be,” says Kevin Deegan, consumer insight manager at Valio.

The company needed to establish a point of difference for the brand, and it realised it was sitting on an interesting fact within its backstory: that Valio butter is favoured by French pastry chefs for its purity and consistency. “The chances are, if you eat a croissant in France, it’s probably been made with Finnish butter,” Deegan says, describing this realisation as an ‘aha’ moment. 

Potential concepts

To help inform its positioning for a new premium butter brand to be launched internationally, Valio worked with global brand agency 1HQ on research to understand the semiotic codes of butter and develop potential concepts. 

This involved a semiotics analysis of the butter category – breaking it down into residual (past), dominant (present) and emergent (future) codes. Amelia Boothman, director of brand and innovation strategy at 1HQ, explains: “In qualitative, you often find that people are rejecting a platform or an opportunity area, and you don’t really know why. So, in our semiotics work, we do an analysis of the signs, codes and symbols within a category.”

1HQ conducted focus groups in which participants were asked to create a semiotics map based on butter-pack designs, rather than experience or knowledge of the products. “I ask them to imagine they’re a martian – that they can’t speak English and have never eaten any of the butter packs before,” says Boothman.

Mapping reaction

Brands such as Anchor and Lurpak elicited codes of mass production, commoditisation and generic origin: while they are established brands with which consumers are familiar, they aren’t seen as modern or authentic. Brands that are perceived as more artisan in nature, but that may still be mass produced, have dominant codes that centre on a premium origin ‘story’, codes of organic purity, or taste – for example, made with premium milk. Brands with these dominant codes included Rachel’s, Yeo Valley and Waitrose Duchy organic butter.

Emergent codes for the category are enhanced taste and a genuine heritage or process. The butters in this category tended to be genuinely artisan, small-batch and not yet mainstream, or new products launched by mainstream brands, such as butter infused with flavours.

After the creation of the semiotic map, 1HQ designed three brand-packaging concepts to test in the research – one focusing on taste, highlighting that Valio butter is double churned; one focusing on organic purity, with a design reflecting Nordic fields and nature; and a third that emphasised the brand’s ‘hidden’ origins as the butter of choice for French bakers.

The concept focusing on premium taste and the production process emerged as the most popular option. The resulting Master Butter Makers brand, also incorporating the ‘secret’ backstory, launched in Poland in 2017, selling 550% more than predicted in the first six months. 

Nobel Prize

Valio has a large research and development team, and a strong history of using research in its products – Artturi Ilmari Virtanen, who led its laboratory for 50 years, was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1945. 

Insights should be the starting point for any brand, Deegan says. “The dairy business is innovation-driven. Traditionally, it has been [about] trying to find a way of making products relevant or desirable for consumers – what we’ve tried to do more and more is have our consumers lead what our innovation should be. We can pretty much produce anything from milk, but what type of products do people want?”

In some cases, that may mean moving away from dairy. Rather than seeing the rise in plant-based consumption as a threat, for example, Valio has launched a range of plant-based drinks and snacks in Finland and Sweden. 

“We have to embrace it,” adds Deegan, “and try to use our innovation capabilities to give consumers what they want.”

This article was first published in Issue 22 of Impact.