Initials launches French Fantasy campaign for President brand

Initials, the independent creative agency, has launched a new integrated campaign for Lactalis brand ‘President’.

Due to run for the next 8 months, the activity centres around three new idents for the brand’s Come Dine With Me sponsorship, premiering on Channel 4. Wider campaign elements include digital out-of-home at key locations across the UK, alongside online activations from banner ads through to video content for websites such as BBC Good Food.

Media buying is by Aegis Innov8, while Brave Spark worked with Initials on the production aspects of the campaign.

The Time For The Good Life campaign features fields of lavender and rural village street scenes, imagery designed to evoke the slower pace of the South of France. This new creative marks a repositioning for the brand, which has traditionally relied on specifically Parisian focused imagery. New insight showed that this no longer resonated with British audiences. Rather than dreaming of Paris, President’s key target market – 46 to 65-year olds living in child-free homes – are dreaming the South of France and the French good life. The campaign has been designed to reflect this.

Heloise Le Norcy-Trott, Group Category & Marketing Director at Lactalis Mc Lelland said, “The French provenance of the President brand has always been of central importance to UK consumers perception of the product, but what it actually means to them has changed over time. As a result, we wanted to start put the focus on the idealised French way of life, or French “Good Life”, instead showcasing beautiful summer Provencal settings to better align with consumer desires. Initials took this insight and ran with it, creating a beautiful campaign for us that perfectly illustrates what the French dream looks like today for our consumers.”

Rachel Jackson, Strategist at Initials said, “The insight that fed into this repositioning work surfaced some interesting points, from British consumers’ romantic notions of France in general, through to their thoughts on the President brand specifically. President is a well-regarded well-known brand, but the high-end nature of the product means it is sometimes seen as more of a treat than an everyday item. The activations we’ve worked on this time around, in particular the media channels we’re working with, will help to move the brand’s products into a more everyday position’’