What’s the secret ingredient?

Uncle Toby’s oats had been an iconic Australian brand for decades. But consumers were losing interest, sales were sliding, and attempts at doing ‘the same, but better’, weren’t paying off.

It was time to get more Challenger.

That flat feeling

Uncle Toby’s oats were ‘iconic’. Yet at the same time, the last thing consumers could really recall about the brand was athletes in red swimwear, which they hadn’t featured for decades. And when we asked the team whether Aussies would include Uncle Toby’s oats alongside Vegemite in a ‘care package’ of food to send to a relative living abroad, their answer was ‘probably not’.

Together, we probed deeper into why the athletes ads had clicked where everything else had failed. And the team realised they’d been drawing the wrong conclusions: they’d told themselves the work had tapped into a ‘heath and fitness’ vibe that resonated with consumers.

But the truth was, it was much more likely that people loved the athletes ads because they were fun, had their finger on the pulse of Australian popular culture and just felt really Aussie.

There were some big strategic calls along the way: The brand team bravely broke with the conventional wisdom of the category that said you had to lead with an explicit health message. A new agency, Ogilvy, was brought in. When initial consumer testing on the strategy came back so-so, the team trusted their gut and stuck to their guns.

Features. Benefits. Fun.

Once the team started believing that Uncle Toby’s could be, should be, needed to be, fun again, they were away. Their confidence grew. The ideas got bigger and bolder. Above all, the team started really enjoying working with the brand – and it shone through in their work: A new positioning saw Uncle Toby’s making an ‘Oatervention’, challenging moments of superficiality in Aussie life, to WAKE AUSTRALIA UP.

Oat-standing results (sorry)

The team’s challenger spirit was rewarded with a campaign that outperformed all the key metrics they’d been set. They reversed a decline in category share, and saw a leap in brand saliency of over 20%, winning a Gold Effectiveness Award at the 2022 APAC Effies.

Perhaps most importantly, Uncle Toby’s had become a really enjoyable brand to work on – which kept the energy and good ideas coming.

And once again, Uncle Toby’s is an iconic Australian brand: the first thing you’d put in that care package to an Aussie abroad. (OK, maybe second after the Vegemite).

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