The Birds Eye UK and Ireland marketing director tells Tim Healey why frozen food still has a perception problem, how changing eating habits are reshaping the category and why the fundamentals of behavior change still matter.
You’ve worked across food and FMCG brands including Jordans, Ryvita, Bahlsen and now Birds Eye. How did that journey unfold?
I left university knowing that I loved marketing, but not really knowing what a variety of disciplines are covered by the term. Initially, I worked at a food service company, more as a distributor, rather than a brand owner. I really enjoyed it.
I also loved working with the brands that were part of the business and quickly realised that it was the brand side of things that I really wanted to get into. From there, my next role was at Jordans. It was run by Bill and David Jordan, who founded the company and brought granola to the UK after travelling in California in the 1960s. It was there that I got my first full sense of brand management.
It was a small business. Our decisions were very much based on intuition. The founder was still a key part of the operation, always walking through the offices. I looked after the cereals and worked across projects that touched the whole organisation, from farmers in the fields right through to store shelves. Jordans was then bought by ABF and merged with Ryvita. In some ways the products were quite similar, wholegrain, high fibre, but there was a very different positioning, which is the beauty of branding.
I moved across to Ryvita, and after the acquisition, the business really changed. It was no longer a small, family-owned business, but the leadership team were very different and had a much more scientific approach to marketing, which was very much in contrast to how it had been at Jordans. I really appreciated that evolution and stayed there for 14 years.
Then I moved to another family business: Bahlsen. There I had to address a challenge in the UK: to double the size of the brand. The brand was not well known. If I had £5 for every Bahlsen conversation I had, which boiled down to: “it’s that biscuit with the thick chocolate, and nobbles on the sides”!
On my watch, we managed to double the size of the brand. I had an absolutely brilliant time in the UK, setting up their marketing capability, but with the backup of the larger business over in Germany.
I then had the opportunity to go and run their central marketing, brand insight team, and eventually I became CMO, where my challenge went from doubling the size of a small brand in the UK, where it had been relatively unknown, to managing a heritage brand in their home market of Germany, and balancing the focus on your core market with different positioning and messaging in international markets. I managed that through a period of huge change and through Covid, and then made the decision that I wanted to get back to my home market.
After a short break, I joined Birds Eye, where I now look after iconic heritage brands alongside a true challenger in Goodfella’s, moving from a global oversight role back into a more hands-on UK focus.
What’s coming up for you over the next 12 months?
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It’s a pretty pivotal year at Nomad and at Birds Eye. With our new CEO, we’re going through a period of change of leadership after 10 years of stability. We’re really focused on trying to make sure that we stay relevant and engaged and immersed in culture in a way that we used to be with our brands.
We will be making sure that our brands are relevant to people and the way that they’re eating nowadays, because eating habits are changing. In Q3 last year, we launched our campaign: ‘the recipe for a life well-fed’, which is about our iconic products: fish fingers, peas, waffles – the things that Birds Eye are known for, and trying to inspire on how people might use them in everyday life, versus the traditional fish fingers, chips and peas on a plate.
We’ve also got some exciting innovations and renovations that are coming, which I can’t talk about yet. We have just launched ‘Get Real’, which is our first foray into real natural health food: high protein and ‘no nasties’ – and there’ll be more things that follow later this year.
We think so much about ourselves in the Frozen food market – and I think sometimes we forget that actually our competitive set is not just that – it is how people eat in general – and it is much broader. At the moment we are really exploring ‘who should we be for?’ How can we be relevant to more occasions for more people?
What is the current landscape in the frozen category, and where are the challenges and opportunities?
Our challenge in the frozen category is a longstanding one. If we could have solved it by now, we would have. The freezer is a restricted space in your house. A lot of frozen food, and some of our brands, are seen as a last resort – a last-minute food decision.
I think people are increasingly aware that frozen food can be good for you – and fresh. It can allow you to maintain seasons throughout the year. It’s also brilliant to help fight against food waste. But mentally frozen food is seen as a ‘back up’ – our job is to bring it from the back of freezer to front of mind.
The freezer has its challenges, not least, in your supermarket experience: it is stuck at the end of your shopping journey, when you have typically spent all your money. It’s not the nicest or most inspiring place to be. Compared to an aisle of ‘fresh produce’ it’s not considered particularly ‘foodie’.
As the champion of frozen food, our goal is to elevate perceptions of frozen food to sit alongside other food types. We feel that is our responsibility. On top of that there is the cost of living and inflation, particularly across key segments, and then trying to balance selling good food at the right price and being able to make that profitable for the business.
How is Birds Eye adopting its approach around the latest consumer trends like health and nutrition?
Our products are healthy and nutritious in general, but often it’s about challenging consumer perceptions of them. A fish finger looks processed in terms of its shape, but it’s not. It’s actually fresh fish, frozen really, really quickly after being caught. It’s then put in a format that is easy to eat. So part of it is about making sure that we are clear and communicating, not just to consumers, but also to the food industry and the government, that our food is ‘good food’.
We don’t need everything to change. We just need to make sure that we bring everyone up to speed. I’ve got a team member that looks after health and sustainability. We’re constantly monitoring conversations that are happening around food and considering how we can be part of that. One of the key conversations we’re having at moment is around GLP-1s – weight loss drugs, and what this means for the way people will be eating food in the future.
So many of the population, the estimate is currently c. 4%, are using weight-loss drugs and the projections are that this number is set to increase rapidly. This is one of the factors behind why people are now eating less food. People are reframing their relationship with food: what does it mean for them and their family? How people are choosing to eat and how we adapt to that is something that we’re exploring.
How is your marketing team structured?
We have the central and local marketing teams at Nomad and Birds Eye. My UK and Ireland marketing team consists of brand, media and comms, marketing ops, health & sustainability, and we’ve got an in-house digital studio. We work really closely locally with the commercial, category, revenue growth management & finance teams, and we also work with our central partners on the Birds Eye brand. We are a fully integrated team, although it falls across different departments. We make sure we’re as externally focused as possible. There are around 30 of us in the UK & I marketing team, and we also have teams locally focused on shopper and ECom.
If you had one piece of advice for mid-weight marketers looking to become marketing leaders, what might that be?
Be really clear on ‘the job that’s to be done’. What is it you’re trying to do? What’s the insight that you have? What are people thinking, feeling, and doing now, and then what do you now want them to think, feel and do?
Next, be absolutely clear on what you need to do to get there. That’s fundamental to your job –but you also need to make sure that you keep your stakeholders involved in your decision-making process.
Once you have clarity around your objectives, you need to motivate your marketing team and your stakeholders and the board. Everyone needs to understand the challenge, the reality you’re facing, why you’re doing what you’re doing. You need to define the results and how you’re going to measure success.
How do you surf the tsunami of rapidly evolving marketing technology?
With difficulty! We have to be agile, and open to change and learning, but also remind ourselves as marketers that we are all about responding to and shaping human behavior – understanding why people do what they do.
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Much of the new technology is brilliant, and it gives us a load more tools. It doesn’t necessarily replace what we’re doing. E-commerce is a really big part of our business, and here we are using technology to help overcome the challenge of the freezer being at the back of the store.
We are exploring how we make sure that show up when people want to find out about food. There’s a lot of tech and AI involved in that, not just on the e-commerce sites themselves, but also in the journey to them. We’ve been working really closely with retailers to make better use of our online presence – rather than being behind a physical freezer door. We are also exploring the whole health explosion and how people are tracking their health using AI. How should we show up there?
We have budget – money and resource – set aside to make sure that we’re exploring some of these things and how they work so that we can make a difference.
What advice would you have for senior marketers when they get pushback in the boardroom?
Try to be fact-based and empirical in your approach. This really helps frame whatever you are trying to convey to the board: this is the challenge that we face – are we all ‘on board’? But I think we have to remember that the board are people, and sometimes responses might not be based on facts and empirical data.
If you’re getting pushback, try to understand what’s going on for that person that is giving you the pushback. What are they feeling and thinking and then try and work out how to work with that or if they have a point that you need to consider.
Approach these situations with openness. Remember that it is a person that you’re dealing with in the same way that marketing is dealing with people and their behaviors. Earlier in my career, I was always afraid of stakeholder management until I suddenly realized that at some point, I became the stakeholder that was being managed. Once you recognize that, it’s much easier to then to think about how you’re managing other people, because you see both sides.
What myth about marketing would you most like to bust?
Firstly that we are ‘finger painters’ and the ‘creative ones’ who live in an ivory tower (lacking commercial realism). There seems to be a lot of feeling that that’s what marketing is, and it really isn’t. Second: almost everyone thinks that they’re a marketer, and that marketing can be done by anyone. To deliver great marketing, you need a serious set of skills combined with experience.
You also have to ensure that everyone speaks the same marketing language: that can be tricky enough when you all speak the same language, but when you have teams in different countries, it gets even more complex. When working with German teams, even though English was our business language, to avoid confusion I had to boil it down, put acronyms to one side and simplify things as if I was explaining it to my mum or a friend. Avoiding technical language proved very helpful and is something we still do today.
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Strip things down to the basics: ‘we’re trying to change a behavior,’ ‘we’re trying to get this person to go from ‘doing this’ to ‘doing that’. Instead of talking about target audiences and segmentation, it is: “who is it that’s eating this thing, and how do we get them to change?”
What question would you like me to ask the next senior marketer when I interview them?
In terms of work: what keeps you awake at night? I would really like to understand that. What are the things that you keep coming back to and that you can’t solve?
Your question from the last senior marketer I interviewed is this: “I’d like to understand what people are doing in the AI space. How are you using AI and some of the accompanying new technology that’s being released? And is it making your life easier or not?”
There are a few ways we are using AI. There are clear areas where we can work smarter and be more effective, but also areas that are more difficult. For example, we have decided that we need to be careful using AI to generate our creative assets, because we want to make sure we show our real food. One of the ways we use AI is in testing our brand & packaging impact instore. We also use it a lot in how people are buying on e-commerce sites, and we are closely looking at how it’s changing how people search and find information – for example, people are increasingly using it to find out their food information, particularly around health and nutrition.
We are early in our journey here. I would say it’s making our life more difficult, not easy at the moment, a lot because of the rapid nature of its development. We can definitely see ways that it will get easier, and it is undoubtedly a core part of the future ways of working.
If there’s one thing you know about marketing… it is?
No two days are the same. And at the heart of all the changes that are going on in our industry, the fundamentals of understanding people and behavior still remain at the heart of the discipline of marketing.
This interview is brought to you in partnership with Worth Your While — an independent creative agency based in Copenhagen, working globally. Named one of The Drum’s Indie Agency Top 100, WYW exists on the belief that time is humanity’s most valuable resource, and that the only ideas worth making are ones that earn it. You might die tomorrow. Make today worth your while.
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