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•Four Greatest Breakthroughs Made by Advertising 153

New York City in the 1970s. She suggested to her client Alka-Seltzer that the pho-
tographs in advertisements should show a hand dropping two tablets into a glass
instead of one. They doubled their sales.

Idea 88 – Taking on a beefy adversary (Knorr)

When attacking a market leader, you do not have to go for the whole global market.
Sometimes a little local campaign can make the difference. Particularly if you com-
bine it with the theme that runs through good advertising practice. ‘Listen to and
know your market.’

About 20 years after launching its competitor to the Oxo Cube, Knorr had
made some progress. It had 7.8% of the UK cube market compared to the dominat-
ing 89.6% of the leader. The characteristics of the products the two companies
produced had significant differences. Knorr produced a more subtle flavour. It tended
to enhance the taste of food rather than, as was the case with Oxo, dominate the
flavour. This led in turn to Oxo being 88% of the beef cube market but only 12% of
the chicken, compared with Knorr’s 58%.

The situation was also different in Scotland, where Knorr had about a third of
sales and Oxo two-thirds. The marketers investigated this difference and put it down
to the Scottish habit of making home-made soups. Research showed that only 25%
of home-made soup in Scotland had a cube in it at all. The cooks did not know that
a cube could produce the same flavour as real stock.

Knorr took a decision to tackle the local market and encourage the making of
soup and the use of its more subtle flavouring to act as the stock component.

BMP produced a creative idea called ‘Monday Night’. This centred on two
friends in the Scottish Highlands. They were cooking blind, and Hughie assumed
that, since Sunday had been chicken, Monday night would be chicken soup. Wifey
back home then surprised him with pea and ham. Her secret? Knorr Ham Stock
cubes.