What you need to know:

• NZ-based global kiwifruit marketer, Zespri International, has seen sales growth of 105 per cent in Australia over the last five years and 64 per cent year-on-year growth alone last year off record results with the help of its taste-based campaign, ‘Crazy Tasty’.
• The campaign, along with companion tactical play, ‘Healthier Ways’. chalked up three awards at the recent Australian Marketing Institute Excellence Awards for their effectiveness.
• For the Zespri local marketing team, switching from a creative platform based on health benefits to taste came after consumer research unearthed taste as both a barrier and opportunity to growth.
• To ensure distinctiveness, the brand brought two characters first created in Japan, the Kiwi brothers, to life in Australia through a unique and local combination of voiceovers, copy and jingle.
• The characters have proven so successful, they’ve now danced their way into 22 of Zespri’s global markets.
• The ‘Healthier Ways’ pilot campaign meanwhile, was funded out of extra global budget and based around building on Zespri’s global brand purpose and positioning. The app-based play was designed to help parents avoid junk food advertising on the school run and tapped into the growing concerns around child obesity and wellness.

A very catchy jingle, two kooky, dancing kiwifruits and the power of compounding creative has helped Zespri International more than double sales in Australia in the last five years, while lifting aided brand awareness to 55 per cent. In another win for the marketing team, since debuting the ‘Crazy Tasty’ campaign in 2020, advertising and promotional (A&P) investment has grown 1.6 times. It’s a situation that’s given Zespri’s local marketers the confidence to layer health benefits, taste and now purpose into marketing messaging as a means of further bolstering penetration of the sweeter, SunGold Kiwifruit with Australian consumers.

Zespri International picked up three gongs across two campaigns at this year’s Australian Marketing Institute (AMI) Excellence Awards: Content Marketing, Experiential Marketing and Creativity in brand, product or service marketing earlier this month. The group is New Zealand’s largest horticultural exporter, selling both green and gold kiwifruit varieties in more than 50 countries globally, representing 30 per cent of the global fruit sold. In Australia, the marketing focus is purely on its yellow kiwifruit, SunGold.

As Zespri senior marketing manager for Australia, Janice Byrnes, explains it, the highly successful ‘Crazy Tasty’ campaign stemmed out of category research back in 2020 that revealed the most common fruits eaten in Australia – apples, bananas and citrus fruit such as oranges – underindexed on taste perception. For kiwifruit in particular, research uncovered the perceived sour taste was the biggest barrier to consumption. Yet taste is equally the biggest driver of purchase for those familiar with Zespri’s sweeter, gold kiwifruit variety.

“Those who had tried gold kiwifruit were saying wow, it’s sweeter, it tastes so good, and we uncovered taste was the biggest driver of category power or brand power as well. So it’s the biggest opportunity for growth for us,” Byrnes tells Mi3.

Prior to this, Zespri’s above-the-line campaign emphasis locally had been the health benefits of kiwifruit. And the approach was successful, Byrnes says, citing strong growth in associations to the fruit providing 100 per cent of your daily vitamin C intake. Meanwhile, sampling in-store to drive trial had been helping with taste, and sporadic taste-based messaging had cropped up in other touch points. But it wasn’t until the 2020 data insights were unearthed that Zespri decided to flip from health to taste as its primary creative positioning.

So the team went to its agency partner, BWM (now part of Dentsu Creative), calling for a taste-focused brand campaign. ‘Crazy Tasty’ was born in 2021, debuting with two TV commercials and a supportive range of online, social and comms messaging. Prior to their entrance in Australia, Zespri’s main distinctive assets were the yellow colour of the fruit itself, and its logo. As well as using these distinctive assets, the team introduced two animated characters, the Kiwi brothers, and sonic branding device: A jingle.

The characters were not in fact created here – they were actually first crafted in Japan in partnership with international agency partner, dentsu, and included both green and yellow kiwifruit varieties.

“It had been so successful in Japan, that we wanted to see if they would work in other markets,” Byrne says. “So we took the Japanese visuals… we went to our agency at the time, and said we have these Japanese ads, the characters are really cool, can we put something together and make them suitable for Australians?”

New voiceovers, copy, sound and jingle ensued, and five versions of creative were made, then tested, using Kantar LINK+. Byrnes said the work “blitzed it” on the scale.

“We did research on whether they should have Australian or New Zealand accents and picked the New Zealand accent given our brand is from New Zealand, but we still had to bring to life these Japanese characters in Australia. So while they were designed and existed overseas, we had to make them suitable for this market,” says Byrnes. “They make it so fun, engaging and really have captured the hearts and minds of Australians. Many people were still not that familiar with gold kiwifruit and our brand wasn’t really well known towards the beginning of the campaign.”

Tasty formula

Today, Zespri’s aided brand awareness is up to 55 per cent, and penetration has grown from 19 per cent to 22.9 per cent. Significantly, sales have increased by 105 per cent in the last five years – and accelerating, with sales up 64 per cent this year compared to 2024, which had previously been the company’s largest growth year to date.

“We’re still getting more fruit coming to Australia for this season, and we’re on track for another record year this year as well,” Byrnes says. “The campaigns are continuing and it’s been a highly successful campaign for us about taste.”

Zespri’s core target market is young families, although Byrnes says with everyone eating fruit it’s keen not to alienate anyone with creative and comms.

“We know young families consume more fruit because they want to be healthier, so if we can make fruit fun for kids that’s great. What we’re finding is the kids are loving these characters, and Mum’s happy as well, so that’s been a really successful formula for us in terms of distinctive assets,” Byrnes says.

As a result, the media emphasis has been on mass market and video-based media. However, a smaller foray into the influencer space didn’t appear to pay off, according to Byrnes.

“I’m not going to say we’ve been heavy on influencers – we did do an MMM study a few years ago and the return on investment didn’t seem as high and it’s quite resource intensive as well,” she comments. “With a small team, we have had to focus on if we can do something which we can turn on quickly, rather than something that’s going to take a lot more time to do… so trying to focus on retailers to give us point-of-sale has been a huge focus of ours. We’ve been successful in most cases of getting display bins, which are branded, and if there’s anything we can do in-store, we keep pushing for that.  

“In some years we’ve just focused on how we reach as many people as possible… as we’ve grown, we’ve added more touch points to reach more people and we have more budget to be able to do that too.”

Today, given their incredible impact in Japan then Australia, the Kiwi brothers have now danced their way into 21 markets including Zespri’s 15 core international markets.

“We’ve had many LINK+ tests where the Kiwi brothers in different languages have done very well, so they have been successful for us and they are now part of our distinctive assets, so we’re rolling them out in as many markets as possible,” Byrnes says. 

Calling it on creative

Nevertheless, switching out what had been a successful communications platform around vitamin C and health benefits given strong growth and performance raised questions internally at Zespri.

“We had those strong associations we’d already built. Then we did this market research on taste and realised it was just pointing us to this direction,” comments Byrnes. “People consume fruit because they think it’s healthy, but then it’s a food, and if it’s a food that’s healthy plus tastes great, that’s even better. They’ll consume more, right? So both of these brand associations are important to us. It’s just finding the balance in terms of which is the priority message. Even during these ‘Crazy Tasty’ years, we’ve had vitamin C icons on our packs, although a lot of the fruit is sold loose here, but also touchpoints where we have multiple messages including vitamin C. So it’s not like we totally stepped away from it, it’s building ownership of one, then building the other, but both are important.”

Of course, with local penetration sitting in the low 20s, there’s a huge percentage of Australians that still aren’t consuming gold kiwifruit yet. Importantly, sales growth so far has seen local advertising and promotional spend has increased too, enabling Zespri’s local marketers, Byrnes and local brand lead, Sally Burtonwood, to get even more creative with their marketing approach.

Purpose plans

Enter the more ambitious and purpose-laden tactical play, ‘Healthier Ways’, which ran last October. The initiative featured an app-based navigation tool designed to support parents seeking healthier routes in Western Sydney by avoid billboards featuring junk food, or fast-food sites on their route to and from school. Zespri also set up a pop-up in Penrith featuring QR codes on out-of-home advertising, encouraging consumers to download the app and participate.

Again, the activity was based on an insight Western Sydney is densely populated with fast food outlets, and that 28 per cent of parents are looking for healthier routes to travel on to avoid such temptations. Broader research showed kids see 2800 junk food ads on their school run each year, per Sax Institute studies. 

“As a brand, our purpose is to help people, communities and the environment thrive through the goodness of kiwifruit. So we wanted to put into action our purpose and establish us as a thought leader in healthy eating, helping Australian to make healthier choices,” explains Byrnes. “Our global brand positioning is more around the natural nutrition space, so this was a tactical campaign to bring to life that purpose.”

Another input is the fact obesity in children is rising, with one in four overweight. “We know pester power is real – kids in the back seat are wanting to have bad food, so we saw that there was an opportunity to potentially take on fast food and encourage parents to go the healthier way and avoid that temptation… positioning SunGold kiwifruit as the ultimate healthy snack, and we were in some ways hijacking the debate on junk food advertising which you would have seen in the press,” says Byrnes.

The app was compatible with Google Maps, Apple Maps and CarPlay, and featured Zespri’s Kiwi brothers, sharing fun facts and being cheeky. Ensuring the app avoided junk food advertising was harder in practice than in theory, Byrnes admits.

“I’m going to say it was much harder to implement than we expected but we managed to pull off the pilot, which was great,” she says, adding AI and other tools in future might improve process. Nevertheless, the results were strong, including reach of 20 million via PR and sales uplifts over the period of the campaign. As well as the AMI award wins, the ‘Healthier Ways’ campaign has been scooping up other accolades, including two bronze awards at the Award Awards, and a bronze at the Clio Health Awards.

“I think it was more innovative in terms of trying to use the tools and help consumers take that healthier option… it was a good little tactical campaign and it got a lot of noise and attention from that point of view,” says Byrnes.

Having already chalked up solid results in Australia, the ‘Healthier Ways’ campaign was funded through additional flex funding out of Zespri’s international coffers, available to all 80 of its marketers globally to tap into to bring the group’s purpose to life or launch things that have an ability to trial and scale up in other markets.

“We were lucky in additional to our normal budget that we got additional A&P investment from our global team for that test and learn, which is why it was a small pilot in Western Sydney. It was about trying to do something innovative that’s living our brand and see what the results are,” adds Byrnes.