Retiring the Animal

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In savoury snacking in the UK, no brand dominates the children's lunchbox occasion the way Peperami does. The difficulty is that lunchbox represents around 1% of all savoury snacking demand spaces. Everything else, the at-home occasion, the on-the-go occasion, the watching-something-on-the-sofa occasion, belongs to someone else or to no one in particular.

'We'd become the biggest fish in the smallest pond,' says David Craft, strategy director at Fearless Union, the agency behind Peperami's new brand platform. 'The challenge was how to become a decent sized fish in a decent sized pond.'

The brand was still growing, which made the case for change harder. Growth within a 1% demand space has a ceiling, though, and Peperami was approaching it.

That arithmetic is the reason Peperami has stepped away from a long-standing brand character, pivoted its entire audience strategy toward 18-to-25-year-old men, and built its new 'Be Bold. Be Meaty.' platform around football, sheep with mullets and Micah Richards. None of those decisions make sense without the number underneath them. One percent is a ceiling. It doesn't matter how well you perform within it.

Consuming in secret

The demand space maths told Peperami where it needed to go. The consumer research told it what was in the way.

When the brand ran focus groups with its target growth audience, the findings were uncomfortable. The sessions split respondents into users and non-rejectors. The user group sounded indistinguishable from people who didn't eat the product. 'We had a chat afterwards and someone said we need to redo this group because they're not Peperami users,' Craft says. 'But they were all describing moments when they used the product. They were just describing them begrudgingly.'

One participant, a university student, talked about walking to the corner shop and picking up a five-pack because he liked the taste, then hoping nobody from his course saw him buying it. The product was fine. The association was the problem. Peperami's decades of lunchbox advertising had done its job so thoroughly that even adult buyers had internalised the idea that this was a children's snack, something slightly embarrassing to be seen with at 20.

Karina Carrico, head of marketing at Peperami, frames the challenge in commercial terms. 'We are the leader in lunchbox. Lunchbox is too small. If you want to gain penetration and you're thinking about savoury snacks as the overall competitive landscape, you need to reach a different target on different occasions.'

According to Fearless Union's research, the largest untapped opportunity was at-home snacking among 18-to-25-year-olds, the core snacking demographic in the UK. When the team talked to this group about their routines at home, a pattern emerged: boredom during mundane tasks. Working from home, studying for exams, packing orders for a side hustle. The moment where you walk to the fridge and want something with enough flavour to break the monotony. Peperami's product attributes, the intensity, the protein, the fact that nothing else tastes quite like it, mapped onto that occasion naturally.

Retiring the Animal

Pursuing a younger audience meant confronting a question about one of the brand's most established assets. The Animal, the manic character that had fronted Peperami's advertising for decades, carried strong emotional equity among people who grew up with him. Among 18-to-25-year-olds, the picture was different.

Peperami had been tracking attitudes to the character for years. The data showed a generational split. People who remembered Animal from childhood had fond associations. The target demographic either didn't recognise him or had mixed reactions. 'They were saying it's a little bit weird, a little bit creepy,' Craft says. 'The response was: I think of Peperami as a snack from my childhood. You're showing me an anthropomorphic meat stick and that reinforces the idea that it's childish.'

System One testing reinforced the case. When fluency scores from previous campaigns were broken down by age, 18-to-25-year-olds showed lower brand recognition with Animal-led creative than with the animatic for the new campaign, which doesn't feature the character. The generation Peperami needed to reach was responding more strongly to the packaging, the green and the product shape, than to the mascot.

'If you want to shift perceptions with Gen Z, the Animal will not do the job,' Carrico says. 'He brings the idea that we are still a childish brand, which is exactly what we want to avoid.'

For any marketer weighing whether to evolve or retire a legacy brand asset, Peperami's approach offers a useful principle: test the asset against your growth audience, not your existing base. A distinctive device that works with loyal buyers can actively hinder recruitment if the target audience associates it with the identity you're trying to move away from.

Football as cultural entry point

Peperami now had a demand space and an audience. What it didn't have was a way into their lives. The answer came from an unexpected place: the warm-up small talk at the start of qualitative research sessions.

Carrico, in her first week in the role, was sitting in on focus groups. Before the formal discussion, the moderator asked respondents to name something that had made them smile in the past two days. Across six groups of six, only two people didn't mention football. They'd played on Saturday and won, watched their team win, or, most commonly, their team had lost but a rival had lost too, and that was enough.

'I said to the team, go back and watch,' Carrico says. 'They all talked about football. If there is one passion point we need to go after in the year of the World Cup, the answer is there.'

Craft acknowledges the insight came from fresh eyes. Carrico had been in the role for a matter of days. 'She came into the process and her first observation was: so we're talking to guys who love football. And it was a light bulb moment. Yeah, we are. We actually are.'

The strategic logic was straightforward. Peperami can't talk about football the way a sportswear brand can. It sells snacks. But people eat snacks while watching football, and the emotional register of football fandom, the tribalism, the willingness to hold loud opinions, the energy, maps closely onto the brand territory Peperami was trying to claim. Football gave the brand a cultural conversation it could participate in without overstepping its credibility. And with the 2026 World Cup approaching, the timing offered a natural entry point.

The resulting campaign spans more than 150 assets across connected TV, social and influencer channels, running as an always-on presence for six months. To stand out in a crowded football conversation, the team built a dual strategy around a brand ambassador and a network of influencers. Former footballer Micah Richards sits at the top, fronting both the broadcast work and a social content series alongside football creator Specs Gonzalez. Richards fits the brand's tone. His commentary style is loud, opinionated and unapologetic. He's also known online for spending conspicuously on haircuts, which connects to the hero film's storyline about a barber who gives sheep mullets to promote his business. In shorter social cuts, Richards even gets a mullet himself.

Alongside Richards, the campaign works with additional creators [names TBC] to produce UGC and always-on social content that keeps the campaign culturally live between its two main bursts of ambassador and influencer activity, timed to the World Cup and the start of the Premier League season. Rather than scripting its influencer partners, Fearless Union is treating them as extensions of the creative team, workshopping ideas and keeping them on strategy while giving them enough room to produce content that feels native to their audiences.

Carrico's advice to other marketers considering a similar shift is to start with the fundamentals. 'First understand where the growth lies and the barriers to achieving it,' she says. 'When you know that, you understand what you need to change to become relevant.' It sounds straightforward, but Craft points out that the hard part is acting on what the research tells you. 'Every business says they put the consumer at the heart of it. The real challenge is actually doing it. That means making hard decisions. That means cutting things you have an emotional attachment to.'

The demand space question most brands aren't asking

The uncomfortable question for any marketer reading this is whether they've actually done the demand space maths on their own brand. Most haven't. It's easier to brief a new campaign, refresh the creative, test a new channel. Those are visible, presentable decisions. Working out that you've been competing in an occasion too small to matter is a harder conversation to have internally, especially when the existing strategy has been delivering growth. The previous work wasn't wrong. It reached the maximum that the demand space could support, and there was no more room to grow there. Peperami's team had the data and a new CMO willing to act on it. Most brands have neither, and default to incrementalism because the alternative means telling the board that the current strategy has a structural ceiling.Looking for a new agency? DCA cuts through the noise to connect brands with agencies that fit

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Amar Chohan, Founder and CEO - Department of Creative Affairs.