A third of South African parents are loyal to one brand of tomato sauce, making it the market leader. Wellington’s Tomato Sauce tastes just as good as the market leading tomato sauce, so we needed to get parents to change their minds. The best place to achieve this is where the decision of which tomato sauce brand to purchase is made – right there in the supermarket sauce aisle. We knew this would require more than just a simple taste test, as the market leading tomato sauce is also the one most South Africans have grown up with and their loyalty to it remains fierce. Working with a development budget of ZAR 1 125 000 (USD 80 000), we rainstormed the best way of reaching parents at exactly the point where they made the purchase decision.
We decided that the best way to reach parents is through their kids. And we know kids like to play with their food, so we made Wellington’s Tomato Sauce fun. Over the course of several months, we created and designed several original kid-friendly characters. We let kids choose their favourite three, who we named Eyeball, Dragon and Vamp Princess. We turned these characters into fun lids, through which kids could squirt Wellington’s Tomato Sauce. And we branded them “The WellingTops”, with their own WellingTops logo. We tooled and tested the WellingTops specifically to fit only on bottles of Wellington’s Tomato Sauce. To help kids engage even more with the WellingTops, we created an illustrated story book about their origins. And then we took them into supermarkets, where every parent who bought two large bottles of Wellington’s Tomato Sauce received a free WellingTop for their kid.
