Marketer not chicken about taking a chance on creativity

Creativity must be given the space and respect within an organisation to flourish as without that it won’t survive, according to the head of marketing at multibillion-dollar family-owned business Baiada Poultry.

Yash Gandhi, head of marketing at multibillion-dollar family-owned business Baiada Poultry, says creativity must be given the space and respect within an organisation to flourish

Creativity must be given the space and respect within an organisation to flourish as without that it won’t survive, according to the head of marketing at multibillion-dollar family-owned business Baiada Poultry.

Marketer Yash Gandhi joined the Australian top 500 private company nearly six years ago after more than a decade at international advertising agency network M&C Saatchi.

Charged with marketing the Steggles chicken brand, the more premium-skewed Lilydale and the corporate Baiada brand, Mr Gandhi said it’s been a busy 12 months launching new campaigns and creative directions for both mainstream brands.

Lilydale chicken ad played on the freedom of the free range.

In July 2020 Lilydale repositioned from pushing the free range category to focusing more on its own brand and, in May this year, Steggles rolled out a new campaign reigniting the latent love for the 100-year-old, iconic Aussie brand.

A self-professed “creative at heart”, Mr Gandhi said creativity was important, but to ensure the value of advertising to the business, the chief executive, CFO and head of sales must all be aligned with its importance.

“Having these kinds of key people as your sounding board, discussing how it will affect them and how we are going to validate these moves, is key,” he said.

With “panic buying going through the roof” last year, the business, which counts among its customers Coles, Woolworths, Aldi, IGA, McDonald’s, KFC, Red Rooster, Subway, Marley Spoon and Hello Fresh, has always opted to stay the course and stick to its brand shake-up plans.

In terms of its brand strategy throughout the pandemic and now, Mr Gandhi said it was simple: “Let’s just get on with what we do best and sell more chicken.”

In July last year Baiada launched a new “dedication you can taste” brand platform for Lilydale, which involved a major advertising campaign across TV, out of home, press, digital, social media, PR and influencer ­marketing.

Lilydale shot and launched a brand campaign in the middle of the pandemic.

“If anything this was the time to accelerate growth,” he said. “We had a gut feel on this, but also as a business, given the growth we were seeing we knew it was an opportunity and time for us to keep going and stick to our strategy and not change everything because things were different.”

Since the launch of the Lilydale campaign Mr Gandhi said the website has had a significant increase in the number of page views and level of engagement on recipe content.

Overall it had an increase of 145 per cent on its recipes compared to the previous year. This has predominantly been led by content it created with renowned chefs Gary Mehigan, Adam Liaw, Poh Ling Yeow and Hayden Quinn.

After spending years building and growing the broader category of free range, the campaign marks the start of a long-term strategy for Lilydale, which solely focused on building the brand.

“There is a lot of merit in building equity long term rather than chopping and changing all the time,” Mr Gandhi said.

He said that while the brand had done a great job at building the free-range category, which by default helps competitors and retailers reap the benefits, it was the right time to increase the focus on Lilydale as a brand itself. “This can be a marketing dilemma in itself when it comes to building the category and your brand along with it,” he said.

“While there are pros and cons for both, for us there was no doubt we had to focus on the brand again.

“We know there’s a huge market for free-range chicken, so it’s about explaining why people should choose our brand over a cheaper product that’s right next to it.”

In May this year a series of lighthearted musical TV ads, The Unsung Hero of Aussie Families, directed by award-winning director Matt Devine at Revolver, were rolled out for Steggles.

Steggles ‘ugly but good for you’ campaign.

Having spotted a spike in workout playlist streams on Spotify mid last year, Steggles also launched minute-long “Ugly, but good for you” radio ads across techno, hip-hop, pop and rock genres disguised as songs and featuring turkey-related references, which targeted its core audience who craved that protein fix.

It was one of the first times Spotify allowed long-format ads on their platform globally and it went on to win a Siren radio award for “pushing creative boundaries”.

While the target audience for both brands is different, Mr Gandhi described the marketing mix for building both brands as similar, focusing on TV, out of home and path to purchase – being the lead up to entering big supermarkets, such as Coles and Woolworths, as key, followed by taking a slice of the online recipe search market.

On the broader subject and role of creativity with the marketing sector, Mr Gandhi said creativity can be increasingly mis­understood or oppressed.

He said those in the pursuit of chasing productivity efficiencies and constantly looking at cutting costs and adding very stringent processes around marketing won’t win out as this only serves to undermine creativity.

“If there are too many rules then there is no room for creativity,” Mr Gandhi said. “If you try and manage it rather than manage for it, that is the crux of why creativity is being undermined – it can’t flourish in these conditions.”

Citing how “a creative adult is a child who survived”, is a quote that has always stuck with him, he said that this creativity can be forgotten, especially as people move up the ranks.

“They can lose sight of creativity, particularly as with greater responsibility people tend to become too worried about failing,” Mr Gandhi said.

“We’ve all had our fair share of failures, but you learn from those and you grow from those. As marketers we have to be curious.”

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