Nuii Set to Melt Hearts with a Refreshing New Ad
Nuii set to melt hearts with a refreshing new ad
Unless you’re a big FMCG nerd you might not have heard of Froneri, the world’s second biggest ice cream manufacturer. But you will have heard of Haagen-Dazs, Dreyers’, and the other brands this Nestle joint venture now controls. In 2019 they were joined by Nuii, a new stick-based launch from Froneri aiming to compete with Unilever’s Magnum and newer, premium entrants in the market. Nuii has been a success, and the brand is now pushing new flavour variants out with agency Toast.
What’s most interesting about this ad, for the Coconut and Indian Mango flavour, is how it also works as an introduction and refresher for the whole Nuii brand concept. Since the invention of the premium ice cream sector, it’s sold itself largely on the indulgence benefit – it’s a bit of everyday luxury, a grown-up treat. What Nuii is doing is extending that benefit to include a sense of adventure and the exotic, emphasising flavours from around the world. (That’s why it’s Coconut and Indian Mango, not just coconut and mango).
The ad leans into this idea heavily, with shots of monkeys, mangos being sliced, boats full of fruit, and a voiceover asking “When did you satisfy your appetite for adventure?”. Nuii, we’re led to understand, is exotic and exciting as well as indulgent – a good angle in a world where real life adventure has been in short supply during Covid-19.
So how does it perform with our audience? The ad does well on our brand-building Star Rating metric, outperforming the category at 4.2-Stars. It’s not quite so strong on short-term Spike or on Brand Fluency (not surprising as Nuii is still a new brand).
Things get more interesting when we look at the emotional journey in the ad – the shots of exotic locations don’t do a lot for viewers, who really start to feel good when the ice cream itself appears. The product is currently more appealing than the surrounding imagery.
That’s inevitable when you’re pushing boundaries in a well-established category with codes that marketers know work. The bottom line is that in ice cream ads, people get happy when you show the ice cream, and exotic locations can’t really compete. But this is work Froneri has to do to establish the Nuii brand and the distinctive associations it wants. Right now the monkeys and mangoes are something of a distraction from the product – but over time Nuii wants to be synonymous with adventure, and it’s banking on the fact that this is a space it can own in a tough sector.
View the full in-depth ad report.