Consistency and understanding the power of your brand’s most important assets becomes even more crucial as you scale. This is one of the key lessons nut butter brand Pip & Nut has taken from its growth journey, which has seen it go from “nothing” around 10 years ago to the leading brand in the peanut butter category.

Pip & Nut was founded by Pip Murray in 2015. Like many founder stories, she created Pip & Nut in a response to her own consumer need. She wanted the energy boost nut butter can provide, but without the sugar, artificial additives and palm oil that were present in most of the options on-shelf at the time. So Murray created her own product, initially making it for family and friends, before selling it on a market stall.

The brand has been growing “rapidly” over the past 10 years, but growth has “really stepped up” in the last four years, Murray tells Marketing Week.

In the last 12 to 18 months, we’ve been thinking about, what are the things that we needed to change in order to continue to maintain that momentum.

Pip Murray, Pip & Nut

Around 1.6 million households buy Pip & Nut in the nut butter category now, she says. But it has also expanded beyond jars of nut butter, and into other products in the snacking categories, including chocolate peanut butter cups and protein bars.

With such impressive growth, Murray has sought to ensure it has the foundations to continue to “maintain that momentum”, so over the past 12 to 18 months has been looking at what needs to change.

The pack design was identified as something that would help Pip & Nut continue to stand out in the sector, and win against rival brands, in a category that has become more competitive in recent years.

“We needed to sharpen our product packaging, it’s the number one form of advertising for food brands,” Murray asserts.

Stepping back

When Pip & Nut first launched, it was able to disrupt the nut butter category and inject some much-needed energy into what was a somewhat “static and dusty” aisle, notes Shaun Bowen, co-founder of B&B studio, which worked on the pack refresh.

However, in the intervening 10 years, the nut butter category has evolved and there is more competition from other brands. The challenge of standing out on-shelf remains the same though.

It has sought to maintain distinctiveness over the years through its packaging, while conveying the product points that mean the most to consumers making choices in the category.

However, Murray says Pip & Nut had become guilty of “overloading” the consumer with all the messaging on its packaging. The pack refresh necessitated the team to “step back” and think about what was most important to have on the product, she notes.

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“I think sometimes when you’re very close to the brand, you can think that extra messaging and extra stuff will help sell it more, but I think it’s actually the opposite,” she says.

It therefore set about to “strip back” the pack so it was not as overloaded as before, while maintaining key messaging and ensuring distinctiveness on shelf.

This work is designed to bring the most “compelling” messages to the fore on pack, as well as continue to “pull away” from the rest of the category as it becomes more competitive.

The importance of consistency

Pip & Nut has been on a significant growth journey over the past decade. In some ways this latest pack refresh takes the brand’s product appearances back to its roots, says Bowen.

For Murray, a key aspect has been pulling through the “threads” of the brand so that they’re “clear and prominent”.  That includes the logo, the white background on pack, and emphasising the naturalness.

The brand began its life with just Murray as founder but the team has grown considerably since then.

“With more people starting to speak on behalf of the brand – brand managers writing copy for social media, another person writing stuff on your customer services – you should all be saying the same, you should all be sounding the same, and it should be one tone of voice for the whole brand,” she says.

One of the hardest things about building the brand is making sure you don’t allow too much drift.

Pip Murray, Pip & Nut

As the team expands, it becomes more important to codify and be clear on what the most important brand codes are. In addition to not cluttering the pack itself, Pip & Nut has also worked to be more clear about what the key assets are for the brand.

“You’ve only got a certain amount of budget to put behind your brand, and the more you put out there in the world, you’ve got to make sure those visual cues are being repeated over and over and over again, and if you’ve got too many of them, then there’s just more noise,” Murray says.

Having a “handful” of impactful brand codes sets Pip & Nut up to deliver consistency.

“One of the hardest things about building the brand is making sure you don’t allow too much drift and you continue to evolve it, but you don’t constantly rip up the raw bit, because ultimately you want to make sure consistency is the number one.”