Berlin – The small Bonn-based company True Fruits, which claims to be the market leader in the German smoothie business, has attracted attention several times with polarizing campaigns. For example, a poster for the brand’s chia seed juice was titled with the slogan “Shake if the seeds jam”. “Seldom makes it across the border,” was the sentence about a black smoothie. Now the 30-strong company has stepped up.
True Fruits supplied Edeka with an assortment of six varieties, which are labeled with the names of the parties that are running for the Bundestag election. However, Edeka immediately returned the bottles with AfD imprint and let them know via social media channels: “There is no space on our shelf on the right”. True Fruits countered via Instagram with a modified Edeka advertisement and the slogan: “We have no space on the shelf for political education!”
Political Enlightenment? For Thomas Roeb, retail expert and professor at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences, the campaign is above all a marketing campaign by True Fruits. However, he calls the reaction of Germany’s largest grocer clumsy. “Of course, a retailer can freely decide which products to sell and which not,” says Roeb. With political statements, however, the retail group dares to step on thin ice. “Political statements are inevitably problematic because a large part of society always sees them differently,” says the economist. Edeka will probably lose more AfD supporters than customers than gain AfD opponents on the other hand. That is psychology. “It is always easier to motivate against something than for something.”
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Thomas Roeb
teaches and researches in the areas of commercial management and marketing at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences.
Roeb sees True Fruits as the clear winner. In fact, the company, which was founded in 2006, has been consistently relying on provocation for years and has already established internally that “the resulting heated discussions are conducive to market and sales growth”. According to Thomas Roeb, they have the advantage of having a special target group that is open to any kind of attention. In the specific case, Edeka even helped True Fruits to make the campaign big in the first place. “Edeka worked perfectly as a launch pad and ensured flight altitude,” says Thomas Roeb.
Incidentally, the roots of True Fruits lie at the Bonn-Rhein-Sieg University of Applied Sciences. In 2005 Inga Koster, Nicolas Lecloux and Marco Knauf started as students as part of an interdisciplinary research project with the production and development of the smoothies in the laboratory. A year later they founded the company. According to its own information, True Fruits’ share of the German smoothie market is a good 60 percent.
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