A London-based natural food company has used crowdfunding to pay for a month-long television advertising campaign in the hope of securing a larger share of the salad dressing market.
Set up in 2009, Righteous sells a range of salad dressings made from 100 per cent natural ingredients to the likes of Harvey Nichols, Whole Foods Market, Tesco and Waitrose.
The Battersea-based company used crowdfunding site Crowdcube to raise £75,000 to film a television advert which founder Gem Misa hopes will aid future expansion. The advert, which was recently filmed in the Philippines, will feature on a number of non-terrestrial channels in June.
Explaining her decision to advertise on television, Misa said: “In the promotions in the small stores, we discovered that one out of every two people who tried the dressings kept using them, so what we hope to do is replicate that pattern in supermarkets but we can only do that by telling people that our product is available on the shelves.”
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She added: “The cost of advertising on cable channels is just a small fraction of terrestrial channels, and digital channels have a 95 per cent reach so it wasn’t going to be an issue of people not seeing the advert as practically everyone in the UK has cable television.”
Misa could be forgiven for resting on her laurels given that the company’s dressings are already sold in a number of popular stores, but she is confident that her range of dressings can become popular sellers in supermarkets across the country.
She said: “Salad dressings is quite an old category with a lot of very traditional brands but we think it is the perfect time for a fresh new brand to come in.
“There are a lot of overlapping flavours with no health benefits except for low fat, and we’re coming in with all these exciting new flavours and we have products that are vegan, gluten-free and we also have a vegetarian cheese product so we have so many health benefits to offer.”
Being a former marketing executive, Misa knows that a good advert alone is not enough to convince consumers to buy the salad dressings so she plans to use part of the funding to switch manufacturer to benefit from greater savings.
Misa added: “The price drop will start in May and the TV advert will air in June, so hopefully people will see the advert, like what they see and then go into the stores and see that price is not an issue for them to purchase the product.”
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