Gressingham Duck®, one of the UK’s leading fresh meat brands, is continuing with its aggressive marketing strategy for 2014. The company - which was announced on 13 February as a Gold winner in the prestigious Design Effectiveness Awards - plans to drive further growth in the duck sector by launching a partnership with Hand Picked Hotels and investing in further above-the-line activity.

Gressingham’s partnership with Hand Picked Hotels, a collection of stunning country house hotels, sees the creation of an on-pack promotion offering consumers the chance to win a luxury weekend away. The promotion is across 400,000 of Gressingham’s fresh duck products in all major multiples and directs consumers to the Gressingham website to enter. Gressingham has also worked with the hotel group to offer consumers an exclusive weekend package.

The Design Effectiveness Awards (from the Design Business Association) recognise the return on investment that a coherent, well-thought-out and professionally executed design strategy can achieve and is the only award scheme that uses commercial data as key judging criteria. This award win of ‘Gold’ in the ‘Packaging. Branded Food’ section is a real measurement of the success of Gressingham’s rebrand. Gressingham also achieved the award of CoolBrands status in 2013.

Fresh duck in the retail sector is valued at £45 million and Gressingham is using every tactic in the book to encourage further growth in this sector. Gressingham is continuing to attract increased numbers of curious consumers to their site, with web traffic quadrupling in the last year, the result of investment in online marketing, their ‘How to cook duck’ videos and campaign in Stylist magazine.

Following the success of Gressingham’s largest ever above-the-line campaign with Stylist magazine, which reaches over 900,000 readers each week, the Remarkable Duck People plan to launch additional above-the-line activity in March consisting of advertorials and advertising in key titles, including Sainsbury’s magazine and Great British Food magazine.

This activity follows Gressingham’s heavy investment over the last two years to encourage an additional 500,000 UK consumers to cook with duck. The current activity is complemented by the development of new recipes on the Gressingham Duck web site along with videos specifically designed to show consumers how easy duck is to cook.

Steve Curzon, Associate Marketing Director at Gressingham, comments: “We are delighted to have won a Gold DBA Design Effectiveness Award. With an increasing number of people looking for a treat supper to have at home, this is a perfect opportunity for Gressingham and we are determined to reach that target of an additional half-million consumers cooking with duck in 2014.”