After a 90% surge in sales, meat stick brand Archer invests in a redesign and a national brand awareness campaign. Andrew Thomas, Vice President of Marketing, shares Archer’s marketing journey with Chief Marketer.
Meat stick and jerky brand Archer was overdue for a brand marketing campaign. In fact, in its dozen-plus years in operation, it hadn’t had one.
But after a few years of exceptional growth (sales increased 90% year over year in 2024) the brand now had the budget to do a national campaign, said Andrew Thomas, Vice President of Marketing at Archer.
“The business has been growing so rapidly over the last couple of years that it’s generated enough margin for us to finally invest in marketing,” he said.
And it needed it. Thomas — who’s held marketing positions at PepsiCo, General Mills, Chicken of the Sea and more — joined the company in October 2022. He spent a year and a half gathering brand health data, such as market penetration and target customer. It found that Archer is the fifth largest meat snack brand in the U.S., but its aided awareness is the 11th highest.
“A lot of people were buying our product, but they didn’t know what brand they were buying,” Thomas said.
A brand redesign
It hired design agency Hatch to create a new visual identify for its brand, including new packaging and a suite of assets that it could use in its marketing content. The new theme is bright orange and with a blue bull head. Archer loves that it is “dramatically different” from its previous theme of black and white with a splash of color.
“We got to elevate the brand,” Thomas said. “We have to build a moat around the business with a strong brand that is distinctive and memorable.”
Prior to this rebrand, Archer didn’t have a target customer and was more commercially focused on getting its grass-fed products out on shelves in front of consumers. That focus paid off as its products are now in 30,000 retail locations including Target, Walmart, Costco, Publix, Kroger, Albertson’s and Amazon.
Now, Archer is focusing on advertising and targeting “health hackers,” or shoppers who strive to purchase healthy products made from real ingredients, Thomas said. These consumers enjoy flavor, a little bit of indulgence and may have kids.
Time to launch a national campaign
With a refreshed design and a target audience — plus cash — Archer hired branding and creative agency Demonstrate X DDW to develop a campaign that would deliberately push them outside their comfort zone, Thomas said.
And it did. The spot shows various over-the-top events, such as extravagant dinners and elaborate gender reveal parties. Then, a person will consume an Archer meat stick and a human with a blue bull head pops in with the brand’s value proposition.
“It’s a little wacky; it’s a little out there,” Thomas said. “But what we also liked about it was the bull isn’t necessarily the hero of the ads. The consumer’s the hero because they’re the ones that are sticking to real and keeping it real in some of these absurd moments.”
The campaign will run on various channels including out of home, digital, CTV, social media, Google and Instacart. It’s also working with six influencers who have a larger following than it would normally hire to develop content for the campaign.
Thomas is excited for how the campaign will perform on connected TV, and specifically Hulu which has a “Get Real” programming block, which is synergistic with its “Keep it Real” campaign. That block also includes several TV shows that fit well with its target audience, Thomas said.
“A lot of these very popular reality TV programs, and we think that is just right down the center of the lane for our consumer target for that mom who’s buying this product for herself, for her family and her kids,” he said. “We think it’s really going to land well.”
Measuring the return on the campaign
Archer uses brand health tracker Tracksuit to evaluate its key performance indicators, such as full-funnel awareness, plus five consumer perception questions that Archer developed, such as, “Of all the brands in the category, which brands are made with 100% grass fed beef?” The vendor provides a rolling three-month average on these statistics.
For this campaign, Archer will see how those evergreen stats change, plus sales velocity, return on ad spend and if it is moving up from its 11th place in brand awareness rank in the category.
The creative development for the campaign was $700,000, and its media spend for the whole year is $2.5 million.
While this is Archer’s largest marketing and media spend ever, Thomas said its budget needs to be “way higher” if it wants to achieve its brand awareness goals. In the future, he aims to have an always-on campaign, with at least 26 weeks of connected TV programming surrounded by display and more.
For this inaugural campaign, getting buy-in for the budget wasn’t too challenging, as management understood that it needed to allocate its marketing dollars to more tactics beyond the lower funnel.
“What was a little more challenging was in a business that’s never worked with agencies like this before, saying, all right, here’s the working media budget, but then we got to go pay a media agency a commission to do these things, and then we got to go pay a creative agency to do the development and then the production,” Thomas said.
Fortunately, Archer’s CEO Eugene Kang supported the efforts, Thomas said.
Reasons for Archer sales boom
Archer in its current form debuted in 2011, when its founders purchased the business from the manufacturers. Sales grew at a steady clip as the brand developed more products and gained distribution in more retail channels.
It was mostly focused on jerky until 2018, which is when it launched “mini sticks.” Getting bulk packs of its mini and full-size sticks into its retail channels is one of the top reasons for the brand’s recent rapid sales growth, Thomas said.
“We launched these 16 counts and they’re obviously a much higher price point, and there was a little bit of a concern, ‘What are consumers going to be willing to pay for these things?’ And what we’ve seen is they’re willing to pay a lot,” Thomas said.
The larger trend around consumers eating more protein, and specifically better-for-you meat sticks, also has aided its sales boom. Archer is well positioned in this space, Thomas said, because its products don’t have added sweeteners and its protein content is from real meat, and not a powder.
“There’s a lot of consumers who, let’s say a year ago were buying protein bars, and now this year they’ve either added meat snacks to their protein bar consumption or they’ve just straight up switched,” Thomas said. “We are seeing a massive net gain from that category.”
A number of retailers have noticed — or Archer has pointed out to them — this trend as well and merchants have dedicated more shelf space to meat stick snacks.
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