5 ways All Things Butter is churning out sales
When you browse the supermarket butter aisle, you might notice most brands date back to your grandparent’s era. Two foodie friends saw that as an opportunity to disrupt the unassuming market by injecting a bit of vibrancy. Here’s how they are doing it.
How All Things Butter plans to make butter cooler / All Things Butter
All Things Butter was born from a viral wild garlic butter recipe posted on chef Thomas Straker’s Instagram that was watched by 4 million people. Just 10 months after launch, the flavored butter brand is now stocked in the UK’s biggest supermarkets, Waitrose, Sainsbury’s and Asda, and has just received £2.2m seed investment to grow its range and reach.
Toby Hopkinson is chief executive officer at All Things Butter and co-founded the company with his friend Straker. Hopkinson, an ex-media planner and former marketer for Trip drinks and Harry’s razors, always had an ambition to start a consumer brand but hadn’t yet landed on an idea until he and Straker wandered the aisles of their local Asda, looking for potential gaps in the market.
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1. Plugging a market gap
The pair were struck by the butter aisle. “I transported myself back to when I was a kid looking at the butter – it’s identical to what it was before. There has been no innovation, the branding is the same, the brands are the same and the product is identical,” Hopkinson says.
On the shelves of a British supermarket, the main butter brands would be Anchor, Lurpak, Yeo Valley and Country Life. “If you take a modern consumer who would over-index millennial and who thought of themselves as a foodie, none of those brands would represent them,” he says. Describing this demographic further, Hopkinson says it is people who eat out not just for convenience but to try new foods and who follow chefs on social media and TV.
The idea then was: “How could we put a chef-quality butter that isn’t so artisan that it would only land in a farm shop and put that on a supermarket shelf? How do we create a product that is as creamy and as good a texture as farm shop butter but be able to market it to the mass market and make a bit of noise around it?”
Flavors are also crucial, with All Things Butter’s first range including garlic and herb, cinnamon bun, salted and unsalted, chili and chocolate.
2. Taking inspiration from craft beer
To launch All Things Butter, Hopkinson looked to the craft beer market for inspiration. “The likes of Beavertown, Camden Hells and BrewDog realized that to really put a foot in those supermarket shelves, they had to go completely out there from the branding side of things,” he says.
Some of the first iterations of All Things Butter packaging were “too conservative” with only a “slight differentiation” to what was already on the market, Hopkinson recalls. “If we are going to make a noise here, we are going to have to do something so different to what is currently on the aisle,” he says.
Hopkinson also took nods from Oatly, which he says succeeded in taking alternative milk out of the health food shops and into the supermarket. “Oatly completely revamped the way that oat milk was marketed, with a completely different line of attack.”
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3. Packaging design
The original packaging was created by Hopkinson and an illustrator. The design features a cartoon cow relaxing in different positions while the typeface is formless, with each letter in a different shape. This is in contrast to “neat and clean” lines on most other butter brands.
Color is a big part of what makes All Things Butter stand out on the shelf. “Yellow, silver and gold are essentially all that is in the market, so we went completely opposite with purples, bright reds and greens,” says Hopkinson. All Things Butter is undergoing a brand refresh where the colors will be made more “vibrant” as Hopkinson believes the packaging, as it is, is “too pastel.”
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4. Social media
Currently, 99% of All Things Butter’s marketing is on social media. “Every other mainstream dairy industry brand in the UK is really bad at social and doubles down on traditional media, so we know that we can’t compete there with the budgets.”
As a brand born on social, All Things Butter has an advantage over the heritage butter brands that are just finding their feet on the platforms. The majority of its marketing is user-generated or creator content posted on All Things Butter’s owned channels and on co-founder Straker’s personal account. “Our page is almost like a foodie content page where you can get lots of different recipe ideas of how you can use the butter,” he explains. In just one year, the All Things Butter Instagram account has 100,000 followers, compared with Yeo Valley’s 47,000 and Lurpak’s 17,000.
Social will be the primary channel for All Things Butter in its first phase of growth. When the brand is ready to go above the line, Hopkinson is thinking more along the lines of experiential rather than traditional TV or out-of-home. “What activities can we do that the heritage butter brands can’t? The sky is the limit for us to try and do slightly quirky things.”
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5. Refining the product message
Up until now, All Things Butter has been trying to land multiple different messages at once – organic, chef-quality, flavored, made from British cream, twice churned. Unusual for a brand just 10 months into market, Hopkinson commissioned consumer research and has rolled out a brand repositioning to refine its product messaging. “Were we really hammering home any one of those messages, or was it just mumbo jumbo?” he remembers thinking at the time.
The consumer research showed that chef-quality butter and made with British cream were the two best messages to land. “There is David and Goliath mindset that we have internally, which is also a feeling that Lurpak uses Danish cream and we are very much in the camp of supporting British agriculture,” he adds. All Things Butter created the 1% farmers initiative, donating 1% of the topline revenue to a charity helping farmers’ mental wellbeing. This initiative will be an important part of its British made marketing.
With his background in growing startups, Hopkinson wouldn’t normally recommend repositioning within the first year on the shelf. “However, I felt that we’re running marathons at the moment when we really should be crawling, because it’s just accelerated so much quicker than we probably initially anticipated.”