Puppet Power – Quorn Score High with Animal Antics

Quorn’s “Why Choose the Alternative?” campaign with adam&eveDDB has been running since 2022. It’s a clever slogan, taking the common phrase “plant-based alternative” and flipping it – the ads both show you why you should choose Quorn, but also position meat as the ‘alternative’ and plant-based foods as the norm. It’s a witty, confident framing for one of the most well-known and long-established plant-based food brands.

Let’s face it, though, while it’s a great line, the slogan is not what people like best about the Quorn ads. Their not-at-all-secret weapons are a trio of animal puppets – a chicken, a cow and a pig. (Their names are Perry Pig, Clarence Cow and Chickson Chicken – who says Ad Of The Week never teaches you anything?) The puppets were created for Quorn by Talk to the Hand, a UK puppet-making company, and their goofy antics have been entertaining viewers across all the brand’s ads. They’ve become a very effective Fluent Device for the brand – a recurring element which helps makes the brand more recognisable and the ads more enjoyable.

Perry, Clarence and Chickson share a mission with Quorn itself – to get meat-eaters to enjoy the alternative products Quorn offers. As with the slogan, the puppets are an inspired choice of mascot. They’re entertaining in their own right – people really love puppets – but they’re also a gentle reminder of the animals you aren’t consuming when you munch a quorn cocktail sausage or picnic egg.

In this ad for the Quorn Snacks range, our intrepid trio mount a daring raid on a woman’s plateful of snacks, being lowered Mission-Impossible style on a pulley to switch out meaty bites for Quorn Snacks alternatives. They succeed, but just as she’s about to bite into a plant-based treat, she catches them. Fortunately, she loves the taste, and all ends happily.

To find out how well the ad works, we tested it with two different audiences. Some people simply are not in the market for plant-based alternatives to meat – they reject the whole concept. It is important for Quorn to appeal to the wider public – after all, plant-based rejectors might change their minds. But it’s also crucial to gauge the ad’s appeal to the large section of the public who don’t reject plant-based foods. They are the primary audience.

And people open to the idea absolutely love the ad, the puppets and the Quorn Snack concepts. Among the sample that are fine with plant-based food, the Quorn ad scores an exceptional 5.8-Stars, and also performs exceptionally well on short-term Spike Rating and on Brand Fluency. Quorn have already reported growth since the campaign started two years ago, and this ad looks set to continue that, with very high long- and short-term potential.

There’s a bonus bit of good news for Quorn in that the ad also scores a very solid 3.7-Stars with the public as a whole, which includes people not currently open to the category. The 5.8-Star score with the target market is the headline figure here for Quorn, but that healthy reception from the general public shows the power of a great Fluent Device character to get even product rejectors on board.