HoneyBaked Ham – Hamming it up for the Holidays

The Challenge: Rebuild the proprietary advantage for HoneyBaked Hams that was lost when the patent on the spiral slicer ran out in the 1980’s and supermarkets became the dominant competition.

The Approach: There simply isn’t a supermarket ham in the country that tastes like a HoneyBaked. The strategy was to educate consumers that just because a ham is spiral sliced to look like a HoneyBaked brand ham, supermarket hams can’t measure up to HoneyBaked’s sweet, smokey taste and tenderness. LA ads also reminded our target audience (mostly women) of the risks associated with buying the wrong ham. Large family-oriented get-togethers such as Christmas and Easter are much too important to risk ruining with a less than perfect ham. A fully integrated campaign involving television, radio, print, in-store merchandising (posters, brochures, videos), website, direct mail and customer emails was initiated leading up to the Christmas holiday.

The Change: As a result of this campaign, sales jumped 23% in the Western region (everything west of the Mississippi River) … the first sales increase in over 3 years. This strategy was continued for the next 1½ years and despite the continued assault from supermarkets and other specialty ham stores, HoneyBaked’s sales grew 27% YOY and led to the opening of 8 new stores…the first store openings in 4 years.