After reading our previous article presenting the overall biscuits market, you might now wonder about the competition. In this article, we'll focus on the different brands of the French biscuits market and their respective marketing strategies.Cookies, chocolate, fruits, breakfast... The biscuits markets is huge and diversified, which leads to a strong competition. Brands struggle to increase their customer demand and loyalty, brand awareness, market shares and of course, profitability. Let's see more in details what their different strategies are...
If I ask you about an "iconic
biscuit", what do you think of? I personally think of "Le Petit
Beurre"! Well, it might be because a great part of my family is from
Nantes but I'm pretty sure it's because it was made by LU, a big player on the
market! With a huge range of products – from Prince to Figolu or Pepito – LU is
the number one biscuit maker in France. With a mind share of 98% and a billion
packets sold a year, LU products are consumed by 84% of the French and 60% of
them even eat LU product every week. Providing a product for every need, LU
targets a wide audience and believes that children are not the only consumers
of biscuits. Moreover, LU is also engaged on an environmental aspect, promoting
the preservation of the environment and the use of genuine raw materials. Since
LU was bought by Kraft Foods in 2007, the strategy is to capitalize on the brand (and
not only on the sub-brands such as Petit Ecolier), which was supported by a
renovation of the logo to guarantee a strong visual identity and anchor the
brand as a whole in the French’s mind.
BN is another big competitor on the biscuits markets but essentially targets children with its funny face-shaped biscuits range. Those biscuits were initially made for the after-school snack and the campaigns are still oriented this way. Like LU, BN also communicates on its environment engagement: made in France, quality wheat, no additives, eco-packaging, energy savings etc. When it comes to nutrition, BN is also very focused on providing good products and advice to help children having a healthy alimentation.
The
market is also composed of traditional family brands, which offers authentic
recipes. St Michel is well known for its “galettes” but also offers other
products such as “madeleines”, cookies or shareable cakes. Even if the brand
was originally traditionally positioned it became a considerable national
player on the market and can now be compared to LU or BN in terms of engagement
and communication: St Michel is also environment oriented and TV campaigns are
broadcasted to promote its products. On the other hands, brands such as La Mère Poulard capitalized on their authenticity and history. La Mère Poulard offers
tasty products (following the original recipes of Annette Poulard, who was an
amazing cook in Le Mont Saint Michel) and promotes know-how, quality and
tradition without “over-advertising”.
Another
type of brands is also more and more competitive on the market: the store
brands. These brands are gaining market shares and represented 29,7% of the
market in 2009. The fact is that little brands that cannot compete with the
huge players of the market started to produce for store brands, providing
quality and cheaper (hence competitive) products.
Now,
let’s focus on the strategies of the two competitors we chose to deal with… Bonne Maman was initially a jam brand but diversified in 1997 with a new range of
biscuits and pastries. The brand is positioned as traditional but also healthy
and pretty top-of-the-range. It targets a wide range using the emotions of childhood
memories; we will discuss this point later on when we tackle the communication
theme. The biscuits are prepared with traditional recipes and quality
ingredients; they can be consumed and shared anytime, by children or adults. Like
its competitors, Bonne Maman uses traditional communication means such as TV
campaigns and prints. However, Bonne Maman doesn’t really communicate on its
history and values, letting the customer writing its own history with the brand
and engage itself emotionally with the products and not its creators.
This last
fact is one of the major difference with Michel et Augustin, as the name of the
brand itself tells the story of the creators! Michel et Augustin is the
“youngest” brand in the market as it was created in 2004 by two friends. The
brand promotes quality products but is not positioned as traditional; on the
contrary, the brand is oriented as a modern and innovative one. Michel et
Augustin products are tasty and often offer creative flavors. The playful
packagings are also very different from what the competitors do. The use of
humor is also important to get closer to their customers and allow an
identification process. Their communication strategy is based on happening and
story-telling, but like Bonne Maman above, this will be discussed in our
communication articles in a few weeks…
We hope
that after reading this article you know more about the players on the French
biscuits market. This analyze will allow us to create a positioning map you’ll
discover in our next article. Then, as you’ll be fully aware of the market and
competition, we will focus on the two brands we selected for further
discussion! See you soon!
By Vanille
Photo:
http://www.continentalbakeries.com/files/producten/popup_biscuit20fourre.jpg
Sources:
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