Evolution in an Instant
Exploring how challenger brands display clear difference and separation from the well-known major players within their market has become somewhat of an ongoing project for LostAtSea, a brand and marketing consultancy I have written for on numerous occasions. This piece focuses on Instant Coffee brand, Little’s and how they utilise owned channels and a recent brand repositioning to cut-through and stand out on shelves. The interview I conducted for this piece with Little’s head of marketing Steph Howson focused on the aforementioned re-brand as well as other ways Little’s have strived to stand out on crowded supermarket shelves. There is an excerpt from the piece below.
Packaging is a point of distinction for Little’s, “We’ve had the glass jar as one of our core identifiers for a long time,” says Steph Howson, Marketing Manager of Little’s, “The jar and the lid, nobody has the aluminium lids. We were the first coffee brand to put plastic free coffee on the shelves, which we’re really proud of.”
One of Little’s key objectives is to produce a sustainable product and as the glass jars are fully recyclable, this ticks that box. The glass jars also serve another interesting, less obvious, possibly accidental, purpose. By making the jars out of glass, Little’s show consumers the familiar freeze-dried instant coffee they’re used to buying from a more ubiquitous brand. By doing this, Little’s reassures their customer base that their product is familiar and carries with it all the elements that made these customers buy instant coffee in the first place.
Packaging is a critical owned channel for brands like Little’s. The jars are bright and the typeface is bold, a major departure from most instant coffee brands which is a deliberate and considered choice according to Steph, “The main focus was to have more impact on-shelf. We have such low budgets that we can’t do out of home [campaigns], we can’t do big collabs, we can’t do paid media in supermarkets. So let’s make the packaging work as hard as it can, let's make it the antithesis of everything that’s on shelf at the moment. People are looking at the instant coffee shelves and they’re like, black, brown, gold oh! A pop of pink or some bright yellow. and they’ll pick it up. Our work on socials comes after that.”