Reigniting a dormant cultural debate to bring the spotlight back on Jaffa Cakes

Overview

Jaffa Cakes – a famous, iconic British brand – known and loved for generations. Or at least that’s what you would think.

The picture at the end of 2023 was telling a very different story. This long standing, McVitie’s heritage brand was consistently losing market share, penetration and ultimately declining sales. Through a lack of consistent investment and veering away from the product intrinsic that made it iconic in the first place, Jaffa Cakes had fallen off the radar, especially amongst younger audiences that had been so crucial to its past success.

Challenge

To get back to the core product DNA that made Jaffa Cakes the star brand it had been in decades past, turbo charge brand salience and actively pursue a younger, Gen Z audience to recruit into purchasing Jaffa Cakes again.

Insight

We went straight back to the heart of the product – to the very essence of Jaffa Cakes that once captured the imagination of the nation. As part of this exploration, we landed on an ongoing point of talkability that was still bubbling in culture – the age old question that had divided generations – were Jaffa cakes indeed biscuits or cakes? During consumer testing of this insight, it became evidently clear that this was already a highly talkable point for the brand – you had only to surface the question amongst consumers and they ran with the baton themselves.

Strategy & Approach

For years the brand had allowed the debate to roll on, but never really, actively addressing it. For our new campaign we decided we would come out swinging, decisively ending the debate after all, that Jaffa Cakes were indeed cakes – after all, what better way to start a debate but by trying to end one?

Solution

Surface the conversation involved a series of ideas to bring the debate back onto the public agenda – focussing more on PR and social channels that were aligned to our younger target audience. We created a Jaffa Cakes mural that then “suspiciously” got defaced to read “Jaffa Biscuits” and then corrected back to read Cakes. We took the conversation to the Glastonbury Festival with our very own “Jaffa Cakes are biscuits” flag and even recruited some Love Island contestants to continue the debate through statement T-shirts (now available to buy online). 

Once we had got the debate back on the agenda it was time for the brand to come in with its own, definitive point of view. This was achieved through some high impact, punchy out of home and social executions quite clearly stating “We’re a cake, you biscuit”. The tone was unapologetically Jaffa, designed to speak to this younger audience in our choice of language.