Mother London Biscuit Building 10 Redchurch Street London , E2 7DD Tea Board Towers 12 Char Street London, SW1P 2TT 2nd July 2015 Dear Mrs Rosy-­‐Lee, As President of the Tea Board, we understand that you are looking to promote tea in Britain by targeting the 18-­‐25 year old category. At Mother, we believe we have the winning strategy to help you achieve this. We know we are not telling you anything new when we say that tea is not cool. The reason for this is that tea is associated with a bygone era and consequently favoured by older generations. Tea is bound up with a British national identity. However, this national identity is no longer cool, instead, multiculturalism is. The ties between a supposed British national identity and tea must be severed. We plan to achieve this by changing what we understand as ‘tea’; by changing how it tastes and how it looks. We do this by exposing that actually the British have gotten the whole tea-­‐
making business completely and utterly wrong. In the first ever cup of tea, brewed between 2737-­‐2697 BC by the Chinese Emperor Shen Yong, there was no milk, and certainly no sugar. Adding milk to tea is the likely product of poor quality porcelain cups in 17th century Britain. Here milk was added to prevent the cups cracking. Indeed, tea in its earliest forms was used a medicinal drink due to its health benefits. Recent research however has shown how adding milk to tea reduces the positive impact of tea’s antioxidants. Similarly, sugar was added in the days before it was demonised in the mass media as the harbinger of today’s biggest cultural anxiety: obesity. By separating tea and national identity, by taking the milk and sugar out of tea, we can restore it to its natural, health-­‐boosting state and attract the target audience. We understand that there is a growing demand for herbal and fruit teas. However, we also understand that these are not really ‘teas’ since they do not use the leaves from the tea plant, the Camellia sinensis. Consequently, our strategy here does not concern these ‘teas’ but the traditional and caffeinated ones. Together with Mother, the Tea Board can weave a far more powerful narrative and beneficial story into tea than the sugary, fatty and dangerous one added to coffee by Starbucks. To take off in America in the mid 1990s, Starbucks created the Frappuccino to attract young people. These coffee based drinks were pumped with milk and syrups. This is not remotely ‘healthy’. When they were first released, this did not matter. Starbucks were tickling the taste buds of a generation who had been reared on fizzy drinks. However, this does matter now. Generation Z are the most health conscious people of our age. In the early 2000s, this age group was plastered across the media for its dangerous binge drinking culture. Recent statistics show instead that now youth binge drinking is in decline and how there is even a rise of young teetotallers. Moreover, according to research carried out in 2014, 20% of people aged 16-­‐24 are vegetarian or vegan.1 This is compared to a 12% proportion of the population at large. Similarly, Holland and Barrett’s Good Life report of 2014 revealed that 20-­‐30 year-­‐olds today are much more body aware and health conscious than they were thirty years ago.2 In fact, only 19% of people today never take regular exercise.3 What this demonstrates is that our milieu is pervaded by a cultural obsession with healthiness most keenly felt by the young, our target audience. To tap into this powerful health discourse, we need to rebrand tea. We do this by changing the actual product, not just the packaging. Teabags are a thing of the past. Convenient? Yes. Cool? Absolutely not. Tea bags are synonymous with the ‘wrong’ British version of tea that we are going to change. At the moment 96% of all cups of tea drunk daily in the UK are brewed from tea bags.4 This is because currently young people are not drinking tea. For them to drink tea, it would have to be Instagram-­‐
http://www.express.co.uk/life-­‐style/health/517246/Vegetarians-­‐are-­‐on-­‐the-­‐increase-­‐in-­‐Britain http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/health/good-­‐life/10457925/health-­‐fitness-­‐survey.html 3 http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sponsored/health/good-­‐life/10457925/health-­‐fitness-­‐survey.html 4 http://www.tea.co.uk/tea-­‐facts 1
2
worthy. To be ‘Instagrammable’, tea needs to return to its original, non-­‐British, form; whole tea leaves. As the tags on Instagram show, when tea is photographed and shared by young people, it rarely comes in its bagged form. Similarly, milky tea is rarely shown off either. The greyish-­‐brown drink we are accustomed to seeing is not social media friendly. There are already visually attractive teas however. Those used in Bubble teas and the brand Teapigs are both tea experiences that do appear on social media. There is however a distinct brand-­‐identity for the Tea Board to carve out for its members; being affordable and domestic. Bubble tea is neither. It is not domestically consumed since it requires considerable amounts of resources and labour. Teapigs’ tea however is made at home. Teapigs also have 12 600 followers on Instagram. Whilst this is dwarfed by Starbucks’ 5 million followers, it is considerably more than Twinings, Yorkshire Tea, Typhoo and PG Tips who, despite being the UK’s leading tea brands, have a combined following of under 10 000. Teapigs tea, whilst being whole leaves, is still available in bag form. It is this that makes it so expensive. Whilst a Yorkshire Tea bag costs around 3p, an English Breakfast Teapig bag cost 22.6p. The tea promoted by the Tea Board simply has to be cheaper. This will be achieved by the absence of the expensive, mesh tea bag used to house loose tea leaves. It is also this which forms the cornerstone our strategy, really taking tea ‘right back to basics’ and having a ‘truly proper brew’. This involves mocking Teapigs’ ‘no airs, no graces’ slogan, as well as Yorkshire Tea’s decades old marketing; ‘Let’s have a proper brew.’ The fusion of the two will ensure a unique identity that is genuine, and which, by critiquing the elder generation, naturally appeals to the younger one. In order to spread the word that the British have got the tea-­‐making business wrong, and to get young people drinking more tea, we need a humourous video. This will not be played on television since this is not how young people engage with brands. Instead, it will be streamed via Facebook. Initially, this will require funding as it will be a sponsored advertisement. However, our Creative team will make a witty short that mocks Britain’s arrogant past and previous generations in order to directly engage with young people so that those in the target audience will want to share this humour. A potential anecdote to be included is how in the 17th century, the cook of Scottish nobility, not knowing what to do with tea leaves, boiled them, threw away the water, and served the leaves as a vegetable, much like spinach. The idea that Britain, a nation full of self-­‐professed tea-­‐drinkers, has been making tea ‘wrong’ is so startling in itself that this will also encourage widespread media attention. This creates the possibility of a social media sensation by way of the #teachallenge which would challenge young people to make tea the original way; with tea leaves, in a pot, without milk and without sugar. On seeing the video, the target audience will consume the idea that tea is not boring and associated with the stuffy ‘afternoon-­‐tea’-­‐type British national identity, but rather that it is drink that is beautiful and actually a rejection of an out dated national identity. Moreover, by focusing on the ancient Asian origins of tea, the video will also stress the profound health benefits of drinking tea the ‘right’ way, and therefore appeal to the target audience. The video would not actively ‘advertise’ Tea Board’s tea and direct links to the company should be minimal. Instead, the video would showcase the way of consuming tea; by stressing the Asian origins of tea and creating an appreciation for true tea-­‐making and drinking. On consuming this idea, when next at the supermarket, the target audience would purchase Tea Board teas when they saw packaging that corresponded to the video’s rhetoric, i.e. ‘real tea’, and the ‘brewed the right way’ type slogans, along with images of Asia rather than the Yorkshire moors. They would naturally buy this product since it’s cheaper than Teapigs and is ‘authentic’ in the sense it does not come in a teabag. You will know our strategy has worked when Instagram is full of images of Tea Boards’ teas and the products are flying off the shelves. To change young people’s attitude to tea, we need to actually change, and improve, tea. Yours Sincerely, Summer Taylor Aspiring Work Experience Student Strategy Department, Mother London