Bella Katz: Whittaker's faces heavy-handed competition in Australia

Whittaker's head of marketing Philip Poole. Photo / Mark Mitchell

This week while picking up chocolate in my local Melbourne Woolworths, I came across a typical Aussie supermarket response to a competitor. Nestled smugly in amongst the Whittaker's bars, was a much cheaper slab of Woolies' own home brand chocolate.

For those suppliers who do business with Coles or Woolworths, this won't be any kind of surprise. Over the years, the supermarket titans of Australia have been shoving and shuffling brands around their shelves to suit their whims. And if that means taking on their suppliers directly, what of it?

Whittaker's number one status as most loved Kiwi brand has yet to translate into Australian market dominance. Sales and brand awareness levels are markedly lower here than those enjoyed by the chocolate-maker back in New Zealand.

"It has been more difficult in Australia than in New Zealand," says Philip Poole, Whittaker's head of marketing. "We don't have that same great history, but we're working on it. Australia is our number two market and Australian tastes in chocolate are not that different to New Zealand, though hazelnut and coconut are slightly more popular there."

The positioning of Whittaker's as a premium, mass-market brand is also much the same in both countries and means supermarkets are the main sales channel.

Made in New Zealand has also been an important part of the Australia story, and Poole believes this is largely due to the international groundwork laid by New Zealand wine.

He also sees the continued involvement of brothers Andrew and Brian Whittaker as a key factor in high brand loyalty, both in Australia and New Zealand.

Whittaker's uses a sales agency in both markets and it's a model that Poole says has worked well for them.

Another successful approach is constant new product development. Whittaker's tries to launch one or two new products every year, some of them limited versions, like last year's hundreds-and-thousands range and the collaboration with L&P the year before that.

Whittaker's tries to launch one or two new products every year, some of them limited versions, like the collaboration with L&P.

"The good thing about those," says Poole, "is that not only do they sell well in themselves, but the excitement lifts the whole brand. People like news and confectionery is very dynamic like that. We have two developments in the pipeline which we're very excited by."

And who can forget another of Whittaker's collaborations: Nigella Lawson.

A hugely successful partnership to launch Whittaker's Creamy Milk chocolate and generate a return on five new roll refiners the company had made an enormous investment in.

"Nigella was hugely successful for us," Poole says. "She's a fantastic person too. She was here for 3 to 4 days and we had dinner with her and she did a master class and spoke for an hour, no script and was just fabulous. We'll definitely keep her as part of the brand."

Finally, I asked Poole what impact the recent cocoa bean shortages had on the business and whether this would mean we'd see even higher prices.

"The cocoa bean and hazelnut shortages have definitely had an impact on Whittaker's and prices have increased," he says. "Hazelnuts have recently more than doubled in price and are getting more difficult to buy. So we're focusing even more on quality, because in chocolate quality is so very important. In Australia as much as in New Zealand, we're focused on communicating that - it's not easy, but we're trying."

Bella Katz is an Australia-based brand and marketing consultant and advises New Zealand companies exporting to Australia. She is also a New Zealand expat, calling Australia home for over a decade.