Yorkshire Tea’s marketing has been alternately irreverent and issue-driven in recent years – and has included recruiting stars such as Sean Bean to front its 2019 “Where Everything’s Done Proper” campaign. 2020 was no exception.
Among other things, last year saw the launch of the company’s “Social Distancing Teapot” advertisement (in which a group of office colleagues used a novel workaround to the government’s two-metre COVID-19 guidance), as well as a campaign focused on celebrating its newly-acquired carbon-neutral status. It also earned praise for speaking out in support for Black Lives Matter in June 2020.
While Yorkshire Tea’s Twitter account openly mocked the idea of releasing a Christmas advert, it still saw a larger increase in Ad Awareness (which measures whether Brits have seen an ad for a brand in the past two weeks) over December than any other brand. Rising from 16.1% to 22.6% over the last four weeks of the year for an improvement of 6.5 percentage points, Yorkshire Tea claims Ad of the Month for December 2020.
During the same period (1 – 30 December), Yorkshire Tea’s Buzz score, which measures whether Britons have heard anything positive or negative about a brand in the past fortnight, rose from 8.6 to 13.3 (+4.7), while Impression, which measures whether Brits have a positive or negative impression of a brand, rose from 42.4 to 46.8 (+4.8).
Its Reputation score also rose from 27.1 to 31.7 (+4.6). while overall Index scores saw an improvement of five points – moving from 33.4 on December 1 to 38.4 by New Year’s Eve.
Whether Yorkshire Tea’s success can be attributed to the cumulative effect of the year’s advertising, a locked-down nation in need of a caffeinated coping mechanism, or something else entirely is not fully clear. What is clear is that December 2020 was a strong month for the brand – in terms of Ad Awareness and otherwise.
