Background

The white bread category is changing and quickly. Where once consumers opted for the biggest brands and the softest white breads, which are the most popular among kids, now there is a growing consumer focus on high-fibre breads – healthier alternatives, but still with the taste and texture of white bread.

Goodman Fielder first produced the high-fibre white bread Wonder White in 1994 in response to consumer research indicating the new expanding market and now the brand is rising again to the challenge of battling consumer perception to get its product noticed by health-conscious bread buyers.

Client: Goodman Fielder Baking
Brand: Wonder White
Agency: Cowan
Packaging supplier: Amcor

Objectives

With increasing competition, white bread cynics and downward pressure on prices thanks to private and supermarket-own brand labels, Wonder White was facing a significant decline in sales.

Vocal press promoted a lack of ‘nutritional value’ of white bread, exacerbating the situation for Wonder White sales and putting further pressure on the brand to change its positioning. Additionally, Wonder White’s innovations in the category – namely the fortified ‘added value products’ with added amino acids and protein – began to attract scrutiny among consumers for the perceived ‘artificiality’ of the bread.

These innovations diluted the reason why Wonder White was originally developed – as a white bread with high levels of fibre, which kids love to eat and mothers are happy to give their children.

Therefore, the challenge for Goodman Fielder was to produce a white bread that had real news around nutritional benefits, features that would break through the category clutter in a way that was believable and relevant to Australian families, and command a premium pricing position.

Strategy

All Wonder White products contain a combination of Hi Maize and various fibre sources, resulting in a minimum of six grams of dietary fibre per 100 grams of bread. Hi Maize, a natural ingredient compressed from a specially-developed maize grown in Australia, has given the brand a unique opportunity to produce a high-fibre bread, which looks and tastes like regular white bread, but contains twice the fibre. The brand’s products contain more fibre even than regular mixed grain bread.

Cowan’s design strategy homed in on this point of difference, providing the foundations for the new design messaging. The design would be unashamedly vocal in calling out the inherent goodness of the fibre content of Wonder White. 

By getting back to this compelling product attribute (and away from the ‘value-added’ story), the white and natural messages could become immediately understood, therefore repositioning Wonder White as an inherently better bread in the minds of families.

Wonder White is known by the vast majority of consumers for its bright pink packaging, so Cowan elected to keep this eye-catching colour scheme. The design challenge then was to manage a balancing act between retaining the vibrant pink colour, which is not a natural colour, and injecting natural and nutritional semiotics that could deliver better brand positioning through the design.

Moreover, Wonder White’s success to date has been primarily due to the simplicity of the advertising message. Consumers are interested in the fact that it is high in fibre and that it tastes good.

Short, punchy details have been the winning point, rather than losing consumers in too much detail. For the brand, it’s been about communicating a simple product that delivers, particularly in terms of taste.

Execution

A new ‘core idea’ for the design would be the Wonder White logo’s own ‘fibre-meter,’ with a distinctive claim, ‘packed full of fibre’.

Further, Cowan took the existing window device, which delivers a clear view to the bread inside, and turned this into another ‘fibre-meter’, spelling out each stock-keeping unit’s fibre content, with direct comparisons to regular white and mixed grain bread.

Continuing to reinforce the potent fibre story, the side of pack boasts a comparative measure of Wonder White slices against other ‘high-fibre’ products, such as a banana, to reiterate to consumers that the brand is ‘packed full of fibre’.

These three distinctive graphic devices combined to create a compelling and eye-opening story for consumers, to begin the journey of understanding that Wonder White products can deliver the goodness and nutritional benefits that the perceived ‘better for my kids’ wholegrain breads can.

This has been a key driver towards the phenomenal sales growth the brand has experienced since its relaunch across Australia on 7 September 2009.

Results

The key graphic elements of Wonder White’s pink packaged products with the dynamic ‘fibre-metre’ has formed the key visual communication in point of sale materials and has created an exciting launch.

The brand new look for Wonder White has made a mark on the white bread category and also within the Goodman Fielder bakery division.

Goodman Fielder’s internal sales data has reported that Wonder White has grown more than 25% over the past 13 weeks versus its previous quarter.

This sales growth was on a relaunched product alone, without any above the line advertising support at the launch. This in itself is telling, given that when the brand was first launched 16 years ago it was supported by a $2 million promotional campaign.

This rate of growth has made Wonder White Australia’s fastest growing white bread brand over the past quarter.

“Wonder White is the perfect everyday meal solution for kids and adults who love that soft white bread taste, but do not want to miss out on high dietary fibre levels in their favourite form of white bread,” said Goodman Fielder Baking, marketing director, David Glik.

“The relaunch of Wonder White’s range has been well-received by the consumer with both sandwich and a thicker slice toast version selling well.”