Nice little earner

At Innocent Drinks even the accountants are nice.  It’s not actually as far-fetched as it sounds, says Robyn Lewis

ONCE UPON a time in the city of London three young men realised they hadn’t eaten anything healthy for weeks. So they gave up their lucrative jobs – one in advertising, the others in management consultancy – and started their own business, making really healthy, fruity drinks.

The drinks were rather lovely and they got more and more popular and the three young men sold more and more of them and very quickly they had one of the most successful small businesses in all the land.

It might sound fairly unlikely but this is the Innocent Drinks company story, a tale that has become the stuff of business legend in just five short years. Richard Reed, Adam Balon and Jonathan Wright (the three young men) were all friends from university, who had always talked about running a business together and who saw in themselves and their friends an untapped market of cashrich, time-poor consumers who wanted to eat healthily but who also needed that option to be convenient.

"We absolutely understood when we started out, this increasing desire for convenience food, the ever increasing desire to eat healthily and a desire for food that was just bloody gorgeous and gourmet standard. So we were in the right place at the right time," says Reed, now marketing director, who I am interviewing at the company headquarters ("Fruit Towers") in Shepherds Bush.

"Smoothies seemed to be a good way to go. So, after coming up with the initial idea, we played about with a few recipes and then bought £500 worth of fruit, made it into smoothies and set up a stall at a charitable jazz festival, above which we put a sign saying "Do you think we should give up our day jobs to make smoothies?"

Underneath that there were two bins one marked "yes" and the other "no", and at the end of the day the yes bin was full."  By now, this story – whether it is true or not – has come to epitomise the marketing ethos of a company, where humour and irreverence have been integrated to create a brand that today’s cynical consumers actually believe in.

It is all about feeling good and that goes from the product itself, to the cow delivery vans, to the website.  "It is more than just a label, it is an all encompassing attitude, generally," explains Reed.

"I believe that the best form of marketing isn’t about marketing tricks.  We really believe in what we do and our honesty and sincerity make us unique in the market.  That’s unfortunate, as honesty and sincerity should be a given in any market and we should be having to do other  things that stand out but it isn’t like that at the moment.

I will never say that that isn’t a good marketing thing for us because it is – I mean last year we won absolutely every award going for our marketing strategy, so I’m not saying that we don’t know or don’t do marketing.

What I am saying, though, is that most people see marketing as being image generation and I see marketing as running a brilliant company in a way we can be proud of.  For me, marketing is everything we do here, from the way we drive the vans to the way we answer the phone. If you can get a whole company involved, doing the marketing, then it is amazing how many little things you can get out of that to build a big thing."

Reed says his favourite example of this approach is the suggestion someone had in the office to do away with the usual code reference on the payment slips for suppliers and replace it with, "Love from Innocent"; proof, he says, that the brand’s simple, good values run right through the company even as far as the accounts department.

The result is that the product, with its clear bottle, natural paper label and simple product names "mangoes and passion fruits" or "blackberries and blueberries," stands out in a market saturated with big-brand carbonates and loudly colourful competitors such as PJ Smoothies or The Feel Good Drinks Company.

"We don’t seek to be quirky," Reed says. "I guess really the question we ask most is, ‘why not?’ Why not make and sell a range of fruit juice drinks that taste just like they do when you make them at home? I think that money and creativity sort of tend to replace each other.

I mean, if you have money you can just pay for a thing to work but without it you have to come up with other, more interesting ways of doing it."  Thus, Innocent has given rise to the cow delivery van and the dancing, grass-covered ice-cream van.

"Those innovations are just a practical solution to the problem we had of getting our chilled products around the country.  We needed something that chilled for 24-hours, not just while the engine was running, which is how a regular chilled van works," Reed affirms.

"Then we thought it should also look interesting so we used Astroturf and then fitted  hydraulics and speakers.  So, when you come out of Sainsbury’s, or wherever, on a Sunday morning and there’s a dancing, grasscovered, hip-hop blaring van you are going to take notice.

People do come over and have a look and it solved the problem of getting people interested and getting them to have a taste, which is vital for us, as the high price can be off-putting for people. But if you can get them to taste our drinks they can see how much of a difference the extra money makes."

For some of those who try the drinks, the premium involved brings more than a taste benefit – the brand manages to create an almost cult-like devotion in some.  The website is full of consumers’ comments testifying to the life-changing quality of the product.

And copy on the label offering a phone number to call and have a chat or to pop into the office if you are ever in the area, are invitations frequently utilised by devotees.

"People definitely take us up on that offer and that’s great. In so many companies consumers are seen as this annoying thing you have to deal with, when in actual fact they are the raison d’etre.

The company is the people who buy the drinks and if the people who buy our drinks want to come and look around then they are massively welcome."  Of course, Innocent does more traditional marketing as well; the packaging is used to send out that clear, simple message; PR has been generated through the brand’s story and there was a poster campaign on London underground and buses last year.

There’ll be more of that as the company grows, Reed suggests, as well as a TV campaign. At the core of the marketing strategy, though, is the encouragement of word-ofmouth recommendation. "As a small company we rely on that," Reed says.

"There is no better form of advertising and I know that a lot of companies spend a lot of money on viral marketing and word of mouth campaigns and stuff like that but how crazy is that? I mean, if the product is good enough people will talk about it.  So worry about that, not the marketing spin."

The questions now are, how much mileage the brand has for the future and, as the company increases rapidly in size and scope, whether the brand can stand up to expansion? "For us the bigger prizes are yet to come, and the business plan is to become Europe’s favourite juice company, but I want to do that in a way we can be proud of," insists Reed.

"I accept that there are fundamental issues that will have to be faced but I say bring ’em on because we want to prove people wrong. We want to show that it can be done like this." There have already been moves from smoothies into thickies and "juicy water" and there are plans, Reed says, for all sorts of developments into ice cream, baby food and even, perhaps, bodycare.

There is a danger, it seems, of a young company overstretching.  But, typically Reed is more upbeat: "Innocent is about a total commitment to making totally natural things and not taking manufacturing short-cuts to make short-term profit, so Innocent can be other things, not just drinks, and I get excited about that. I think there are lots of areas where we can show it can be done better."

Having already succeeded in establishing a consistent brand identity in all aspects of the company, there seems no reason to doubt that the team won’t be able to translate that through to others sectors.

Of course it is always a risk and like anything in life a "happy ever after" ending isn’t  guaranteed – even for a business fairy-tale as good as this.