Relaunching a heritage brand

When it comes to ordering flowers on the phone or online, Interflora is probably the most recognised brand in the UK. And that’s not surprising because it’s been around for over a century. Today, it’s a delivery platform associated with over 58,000 affiliated flower shops in over 140 countries.

However, in recent years, a number of well-funded, digital first-businesses have scaled up and eaten into Interflora’s position as market leader, with their modern brand identities, slick customer experiences and increased media spend. Interflora needed to relaunch the brand and drive buzz and talkability to connect with a new generation of shoppers.

Working closely with Interflora’s strategy and creative agencies, we chose to focus on a younger, more affluent, and urban audience. This was a segment where Interflora had lost ground in brand awareness, familiarity and usage. We defined a target audience by their life stage, attitudes and behaviours called Generous Gifters: broadly 25-45 and at a stage in their life when their friends and family have lots of flower-worthy milestones.

A new creative platform ‘Say More’ repositioned this legacy, traditional brand with a more modern attitude, a fresh design, and a tone of voice that was relatable to younger audiences – including the small local business owners that Interflora relies on for its network.

To take this new brand platform out to a new audience, we overhauled the media strategy. We introduced the campaign with a bold OOH strategy in major cities to grab people’s attention and get them to stop and rethink Interflora.

We rolled out a modern AV strategy, that leveraged both traditional TV watercooler moments alongside data-driven video. We built custom audiences using Amazon’s shopping data to identify ‘Generous Gifters’ and reached them across Prime Video.

In YouTube we deployed semantic targeting to identify the channels and videos that would chime best with our audience. We used AI to scan millions of videos for relevant content from home decor, to flower arranging, to certain celebrities we knew our audience identified – bringing a layer of precision targeting not available through a standard YouTube buy.

Lastly, we leveraged social media platforms from TikTok to Instagram and Pinterest, and worked closely with the creative agency to adapt creative for the media environment.