Greggs embraces the blurred reality of modern branding

Brands often play too carefully into our preconceptions, but Greggs doesn’t give a sausage about all that, says SHOOK’s co-founder Gemma Moroney.

Yesterday on the Lizzie Line, I saw a girl holding a Blank Street drink and carrying a Greggs bag (of joy).

It made me think about how brands pretend people exist in hermetically sealed bubbles, where they’re eating their brand - and only their brand - for breakfast, lunch and dinner. They think in ‘siloes’, rather than the seriously messy reality of everyday life.

In the real world, we might have a handful of brands we’re seriously dedicated to, but mainly, we shop from a wide, contradictory toolbox of brands. We eat clean by day but smash a late-night burger with a Nuggs chaser. We buy Gazelles for work and Zooms for the gym. Or buy a Patagonia jacket to wear over a Primark t-shirt.

And that’s why I like the latest Greggs campaign: a pop-up pilates studio to mark the launch of its matcha range.

Pilates and pasties can and do co-exist in real lives. And it literally does in this activation, because you get a free sausage roll as well as a free matcha.

Of course, the story works as a news story, because it’s Greggs doing wellness (LOL, pasty punchline). But it works even better as a new product launch because it absolutely reflects behaviour (i.e. I’ve been to the gym, I can have a cake now; I’ve done Pilates, get that pasty into my belly).

As an aside, one cynical question in this is whether aligning Greggs to Pilates around the same time as the new HFSS regulations was a considered/ clever move?

Greggs is never going to be cutting edge (e.g. launching hojicha, not matcha), and nor should it be, because it’s a brilliant, mainstream brand. 

It never fails to cut through because it knows what it is, who it’s talking to and what their lives look like… and because its sausage rolls are one of the most delicious foods to exist.

As a result, this creative idea isn’t cutting-edge either, but it absolutely works. And at the end of the day, that’s what matters. Greggs serves. Literally, from behind a glass counter, and sometimes from a wellness studio.

As Molly Mae so wisely said recently when summing up the entirety of female existence, ‘You’re either an iced latte girl or a matcha girl.’

And in this case, despite the fact I hate matcha, colour me sage green.