Quorn Foods’ Gill Riley on why a strong brand voice is her key marketing ingredient

My route was far from traditional. I studied food science at university and started my professional life in product development. My degree and all my studies were based on science. I was a food scientist. My first role was with Britvic soft drinks, developing new drinks, which was really good fun.

I loved it but there was a was a bit of a niggle. I really wanted to understand why I was being asked to develop these new products. I guess my curious – some might say nosey – nature meant that I wanted to better understand the motivations of the marketing team that were briefing me on the product development side of things.

I would get myself invited into research groups and on to project teams to find out more, and I worked out quickly that I was really motivated, interested and keen to learn more about consumers. Why did they need these things? Why did they want these things? Why would they choose one product over another? What products were going to change their lives? And then what brands could do to make their products stand out and be chosen.

Quite quickly (and luckily), I was invited to work in the marketing team at Britvic. I jumped at the chance to move from the technical side into the more commercial wing of the business. It was a great opportunity for me.

From there on, I worked in trade marketing and then marketing and innovation. I was fortunate enough to take up roles from a brand marketing perspective and a trade marketing perspective with Diageo. Then I moved to Kellogg’s, where I was able to move back to the north – my heartland – and worked on the fantastic brand Special K.

I have remained fascinated by consumers ever since: what makes them tick – and how the brands can address their needs whilst helping to grow business.

Mine has been (and continues to be) an enjoyable and dynamic journey. It’s never boring, because there’s always a new challenge. I see marketing as an ever-evolving series of problems to be solved – but really interesting, exciting problems, because ultimately, the world is always changing. Therefore, consumers are always changing. There’s always an opportunity to address new needs, to break down barriers, and really give consumers what they want or need. That’s never going to go away, which is why it is such an interesting career and for me, a brilliant profession to be in.

In these uncertain economic times, what does 2024 look like in terms of growing your brands and increasing sales?

We’re focused on encouraging as many people as possible to make small changes to their diet and enter the meat-free category through our Quorn and Cauldron brands. It is about simple changes as opposed to a wholesale lifestyle change. Could you swap in one of our products once a week for dinner or as a snack to make a difference to your own health, your family’s health and the health of the planet as well?

The simplest way to bring people into the category is by giving them something delicious, nutritious, accessible and affordable. Our snacks portfolio offers that and that’s where we’ve really focused our efforts this year. They are absolutely delicious, high in protein, low in saturated fat, there is no preparation required and they are at a really accessible price point. They are the perfect entry point for someone into the world of meat-free eating.

This led us to developing and running the biggest campaign of its kind for the chilled meat-free category this year, in terms of touch points and investment – a campaign we executed from screen to shelf.

Our iconic puppets returned with a new TV advert to show a new audience of meat eaters just how delicious our snacks are. We drove this activity right through to the point of purchase with shopper marketing activity across the major multiples.

We see Perry Pig and his friends doing all their own stunts, in a bid to show that there really is no need to choose the alternative as Quorn is so tasty! Our trio of puppets launch into a Mission Impossible-style operation, to sneakily replace regular meat snacks with the tasty and newly improved Quorn Cocktail Sausages and Picnic Eggs.

The new ad creative is something really special. It was designed to drive mental availability through our wonderful characters and great humour. We’ve been able to bring our brand assets alive in store, we’ve had great promotions and great display ads. It is a strong example of driving mental availability out of store, then convincing people to try Quorn for the first time at the point of purchase.

The iconic Quorn puppets star in the ‘Mission Snack Swap’ campaign

Can you tell us about your team? How is it organized and structured?

My team is responsible for anything that touches the consumer, or the shopper and importantly, establishing that two-way relationship. There are four key teams that report into me.

We’ve got the brand team that are responsible for the development, execution and evaluation of multichannel communication and packaging across the Quorn and Cauldron brands.

There’s innovation, the team that drives strategic innovation, and looks at where we go next, how we evolve our products and how we evolve the category. The insights and category team look at all consumer trends, consumer knowledge, right through to shopper trends and retailer trends, so that we can start to build cohesive strategies and plans – this covers anything from campaign development right through to plans for the fixtures, for example.

The fourth team is the consumer sensory science team. They provide insight into how our products and competitor products perform in the eyes of the consumer so we can strive to continually improve.

How important is empowering your team and autonomy? What have you learned in your career that enables you to get the best out of your teams?

Empowerment is absolutely crucial. I have a very simple motto: look after your team as you would like to be treated. It’s a very effective belief to live by. Throughout my career, I’ve been given an incredible amount of freedom to become an expert in my chosen area – whether that’s innovation, brand management, trade marketing or team management.

I’ve also been given the right level of guidance and support along the way. I see my role as providing the support to point people in the right direction but also being the safety net if they need one.

In order to grow, both personally and to grow the business, we need to learn through what we do. As individuals, we learn from our successes and from our mistakes. I think at Quorn we have a great culture that allows us to do that.

Collaboration is also really important part of that empowerment piece: learning from each other, from each other’s mistakes, and from what we do differently. This can only be done in an open and honest environment.

The meat-free category is very dynamic and fast-moving and as a marketing team, we need to be agile. Agility relies on empowerment and a degree of autonomy so that we can be dynamic – there are some larger organizations where to do something new or different can be like trying to turn an oil tanker – that’s not us.

Quorn’s snack range provides meat-free alternatives

How important is brand voice when maximizing your customers’ engagement with the campaign?

Brand voice is absolutely critical. Brand voice sets you apart from your competitors and is as important as what you say.

A strong, consistent brand voice ties together everything we do and, most importantly, makes it memorable for consumers.

We worked incredibly hard with our agency partners to create a voice that could cut through and land in quite a functional category that is built on health, sustainability and for many animal ethics.

This led to our ‘So Tasty, Why Choose the Alternative’ campaign, which playfully invites consumers to consider their choices and suddenly it’s meat that’s the alternative protein, not Quorn. The tongue-in-cheek, relatable but thought-provoking storytelling challenges perceptions of taste for Quorn and the category.

The use of our funny, loveable puppets are memorable and engaging and bring distinctive assets to the brand which we have leveraged through the line and will continue to do so. The incredible System 1 scores for our most recent snacks campaign – with exceptional ratings across the board – show that our brand voice has resonated with consumers.

The Cauldron range of products provide easy-to-prepare meat-free meals

Have you any tips on how to navigate the choppy waters of big business organizations, for example, where considered marketing plans get pushed back from the C-suite upstairs?

Because of the size and agility of the Quorn business, that’s not been a recent issue for me. From a larger organization point of view, my advice would be this: firstly, stay true to what you believe in [and] show that your plans meet the needs of the business and your target consumer – even if you need to gather more evidence to win your internal audience over.

At the same time, be open-minded and listen to any feedback: ask questions and seek understanding as to why a plan might have been pushed back. There could be a simple adaptation that might lead to a plan being signed off. Ask for more information and be curious and then you might be able to make those changes.

Never take the pushback personally. When you’ve worked so hard on something this isn’t easy, but the decision may relate to something beyond your control.

With such a plethora of choices and an ever-changing landscape, senior marketers increasingly have to join the dots between different technology solutions. What’s your approach at Quorn?

We’re a consumer-focused business, so it’s really important that we continue to watch and understand the role that different technologies play in consumers’ lives. We continually adapt our approach to stay relevant to them.

Within the digital arena we take a test-and-learn approach. Where we can learn quickly, we can adapt and move on. We can then build those learnings into our bigger investment campaigns.

We are also taking the test-and-learn approach with AI tools. The potential is huge but for me, the best insights, campaigns and activations will always come from a spark of brilliant creativity triggered by a simple human truth. I then see technology supporting those ideas, building strong foundations to launch from.

We need to be careful when using AI because there is a risk that you end up doing the same as everybody else. As marketers, it is our duty to ensure that this never becomes an issue in marketing. Human truth is fundamental. This is where layering on the brand tone of voice is really crucial as well. A strong tone of voice will continue to set us apart.

Quorn Pieces: deliciously meat-free

What are your views on synthetic data in marketing?

Synthetic data will certainly make life easier in some ways. There’s definitely a role for it in marketing, but I just wouldn’t lose sight of the reason we love being marketers: it is because we’re able to address human needs as humans ourselves.

If you need some level of knowledge and perhaps are limited by budget, synthetic data can be a great starting point. But we will still need a human view to pull the data together.

There is also a risk of regurgitated data: if everyone’s scraping the internet for AI models, then everyone’s only looking retrospectively. If we’re all searching for the same thing, then the output is going to be very similar.

How do you ensure clarity around market orientation specifically to do with your competitors, and customer knowledge?

My team is the knowledge engine of our business. I refer to us as ‘the beating heart’ because without that insight and knowledge, we can’t direct what everybody should be looking at, should be considering and should be building within their plans across all the marketing and business functions. It may be a cliché but knowledge really is power.

Because my teams all sit together under one function, the knowledge they have and insight they bring together captures everything from consumer and customer trends, alongside marketing and industry trends. This plays a really fundamental role in making sure that everything we do from a business and campaign point of view, and an NPD perspective, is the best on the market and will resonate with our target audiences.

This in turn ultimately allows us to develop a clear and consistent story to share with the broader business. Then our supply chain colleagues, finance colleagues, technical colleagues are all informed in the same way to the same level. When we start to develop strategies and plans and briefs all of these different teams are on the journey with us: that’s really key.

When we think about customer knowledge and data, we don’t only consider this information at the planning and execution stages, we also measure effectiveness and evaluate activities so that we all continue to learn and develop through the cycle. This way we can go on to be bigger and better next time around. We are in this perpetual cycle: developing ourselves to develop our brands to develop the category and to develop our business.

How do you approach balancing the need for communications to be memorable and the desire for risk-taking? If there’s a scale, where naught is no risk at all and 100 is all out, where are you and where is it going?

I’m not going give you a score. I don’t see them as opposite ends of the spectrum at all. I think that ‘memorable’ and ‘risk-taking’ are not as far apart as you think. As a result, I don’t see the need to balance. If you know your target audience and you test your comms to some degree, then you know the level of risk that you are taking to join all of the communication dots.

Being systematic like this allows us to take risks within boundaries. For example, we might target a different audience with a digital campaign based on the same creative platform to see how it goes.

We can flex a message: within the Quorn world, we might try a taste message versus a health message with a certain audience and see how that how that works. Or we might take a different approach with influencers. As long as it connects back to brand strategy and great consistent creative campaign ideas, then it is not a risk.

The Cauldron range

How do you go about balancing the need for longer term brand building and more short term sales activation campaigns?

For the long-term health of a brand, it is crucial to continue investing in long-term growth, as well as responding to the changing needs of the consumer in the shorter term.

Consumer trends and barriers may change but the fundamental drivers of a category and the brand’s role within that will always be relevant as long as we, as marketers, continue to understand our current and future consumers.

This means long-term investment: really building the future of brands, but also being acutely aware of the current consumer needs: what are the challenges? What are the barriers? These are especially important in the meat-free category. Short-term trends and barriers are ever-changing and will evolve. Tactical solutions can respond to them in the short term but those solutions will not improve our brand health. As senior marketers, if we continue to build strategies and plans for the long term but also work with the short term and be flexible, then I believe we get that long-term sustained growth and success.

Businesses so often get stuck in the short term. We’re all assessed on annual performance results. The role of the marketing team, under the guidance of senior marketers, is to grow and develop your brand for the long term.

I’ve spent a lot of time looking at return on investment on a number of activities across a number of areas within the business. It’s easy to show what happens if you don’t invest. As a senior marketer, it is our job to engage with key stakeholders within the business to help them understand why investment in longer-term strategies is essential – and we need to be able to show this with data. In my experience, and certainly with Quorn, it has paid off.

‘Just within reach.’ The Quorn puppets on their mission to eat the plant-based snacks

I am wondering what advice you might have for younger marketers who find themselves reading this interview. Imagine you’re speaking to a younger you, starting your career in marketing – what advice might you give her? And what should she do more of or avoid?

Firstly, love what you do. Within that: be passionate, be confident and be open. When I look back at myself, I think given that my route into marketing wasn’t traditional, I probably was a little reserved when I began. Perhaps I sat on my thoughts a bit too much and didn’t really open up as quickly as I should have done. My advice would be to have a point of view and be confident with it. A point of view gives others something to react to and opens up great dialogue. Equally important is to be open-minded in that dialogue and listen to others as well.

At the start of my career, I thought everyone was more of an expert than me, especially because I had not taken a traditional route or studied marketing. In effect, I was learning on the job. I quickly realized that there is no one person who knows everything. Others may have more experience than you, but you’ll acquire that experience.

Lean on your managers. They’re there to support and develop you. And they want you to succeed. Be open with them and have peer-to-peer type conversations. I learned lots from my managers. One of the best things a manager said to me early in my career was this: “Marketing. It’s just common sense.”

They were right. Once you put the consumer at the heart of everything, and you understand what your brand needs to do to meet their functional and emotional needs. It all makes sense; it all clicks into place. For me, that was just really, really clear.

Finally: try and get as many experiences as you can, whether it’s trying different roles, attending different events, speaking to as many people as possible. Marketing is so big, it’s so multifaceted; the more experience you can get early on, the more likely you are to discover the elements that you really enjoy, which in turn will serve you well as you develop your marketing career.

If there’s one thing you’ve learned about marketing, it is?

I think it’s the best job in the world because it’s ever-changing. You’re never going to be bored. The world around us changes. Consumers change. New opportunities and new challenges arise. As marketers, we’re the people that need to respond and drive our business forward. So it’s a big responsibility, but it’s a brilliant responsibility to have. It’s a constant world of problem-solving, which is challenging, enjoyable, ever-evolving and fun.

You might die tomorrow so make it worth your while. Worth Your While is an independent creative agency helping brands do spectacular stuff people like to talk about. wyw.agency.

Little Grey Cells is Tim Healey, founder and curator of Little Grey Cells Club, the UK’s premier Senior Marketer meet up.