We Are Family

In 2014, McCain came to us with a challenge. Price-conscious consumers were buying more supermarket own label chips, and shopping more at discount stores where McCain products weren’t stocked. This was making McCain more reliant on price discounting, which was starting to affect their revenues. 

McCain’s primary audience – parents – often felt uninspired by frozen foods and guilty about relying on quick meal solutions for busy midweek dinners, which made them less likely to pay more for McCain over cheaper alternatives. With the category becoming commoditised, we needed a way to reconnect with McCain’s consumers and reinvigorate the brand’s appeal.

We noticed that advertising and the media in general typically presented ‘idealised’ but unrealistic portrayals of family life and food. Families in ads were often white, nuclear, and middle-class, with perfect homes and elaborately prepared meals. But the reality of British family teatime looked nothing like this. Consumers told us their reality was so much messier, informal, and fun. Also, British families were more diverse than ever – from more single and same-sex parents, to more blended families, to different ethnic groups.

It's no wonder then, that 70% of families felt their reality wasn’t represented in advertising. We saw an opportunity to bridge this gap and start building emotional connections with our audience by celebrating the messy, joyful reality of family life through the lens of teatimes.  

We developed a new strategic platform, “the joyful reality of family teatimes”, and a new brand world to bring it to life, which we called “Really real”. 

This was direct attempt to go against the narrow white middle-class world of idyllic houses and children dressed like minor royals. We would show modern Britain as it was – and celebrate it. We would cast real families, not actors, and film them in their real homes. We would show the messiness and mistakes. We would not care one bit about table manners, middle class aspirations or celebrity chefs. Most importantly, we would show the joy of it all.

This “Really Real” approach unlocked emotional value in our advertising and represented a groundbreaking shift for McCain, as it became one of the first brands to authentically portray British families in a way that truly resonated with them.

The resultant long-running “We Are Family” campaign puts McCain at the heart of those shared family moments. Creative executions have evolved over the years with changing cultural context, but always staying true to the core strategic platform. 

Alongside this creative vehicle, McCain made a commitment to invest in long-term emotional brand building which would help reduce price sensitivity among consumers, making McCain more resilient to market challenges and better able to manage their margins. And after 10 years of this strategy, we can now say that they have achieved exactly that.