Iced tea brand YumCha has launched a new marketing campaign that will concentrate on “putting the tea back into iced tea”, as the company prepares to bring the brand back home.
The firm will embark on an intensive six-month campaign from April, running throughout the summer, that will aim to educate consumers and retailers on how real iced tea should taste and how versatile it should be.
The “five-figure investment” will focus primarily on PR – both in print and online – and social media, with a total revamp of the brand’s Facebook page and the addition of further social media platforms to give the brand increased personality and provide consumers with a history of each flavour profile. Sampling activity will also run alongside the PR and social media campaign to get products into as many people’s hands as possible and encourage trial consumption.
The British brand, which was launched in 2012, has so far concentrated on the mainland European market where consumption of iced tea is considerably higher than in the UK, accounting for “a large proportion” of the $40bn global market. YumCha will seek to capitalise on the “growing consumer demand for innovative cold drinks” launching the range in the UK, after figures from Mintel suggested that 29% of consumers could be interested in new formats of tea, with 34% open to the idea of brewing their own iced tea.
As well as the right timing, YumCha founder Guy Woodall thinks that the brand offers enough of a difference to existing iced tea offerings to tempt new consumers into the category.
“Pick up a standard bottle of iced tea from a UK shelf and you’re likely to find ‘flavourings’, ‘acids’ and ‘acidity regulators’ amongst the ingredients,” a spokesperson for the brand said. “These are largely added as a means to preserve the drinks for longer and allow them to be made from a powder base. Although this might make commercial sense it does nothing for the taste, removing most of the real tea flavour and turning iced ‘tea’ into little more than an everyday juice-style drink.”
YumCha has developed an innovative new method of manufacturing iced tea, which allows for the production of a commercial iced tea product using a traditional process. The technique uses only natural ingredients and means that real tea becomes a more prominent feature of the drinks, which also contains less sugar.
They are available in Earl Grey, Moroccan mint, sour plum, jasmine and lemon ceylon flavours.
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