Biscuit boss says row is just a storm in a tea cake
IT provoked the wrath of cybernats by daring to call its most famous product the ‘Great British tea cake’.
And the further decision by Lanarkshire-based Tunnock’s not to use i ts Scottish l i on rampant l ogo i n an English advertising campaign for the chocolate- covered treats only served to fuel their outrage.
But yesterday, as the social media storm over the move deepened, the boss of the firm insisted the lion symbol, which dates back to its founding in 1890, would be retained on the boxes in which 3.5 million of the tea cakes are sold every week.
The company’s products are facing boycott calls from the legion of proindependence activists online who have branded the long-established family firm ‘traitors’ over the controversial marketing campaign.
Boyd Tunnock, the company’s veteran managing director, fanned the flames of the row by saying in a BBC radio interview yesterday that he did not care about the Nationalists’ reaction – as he is a Tory.
Asked about the cybernat backlash, he conceded ‘ you can annoy people quite easily’, but said the furore was a ‘storm in a tea cake’.
On Twitter, one SNP member said: ‘Re-branding is one thing – what Tunnocks did was a brazen rejection of Scotland.’
Another independence supporter said: ‘Imagine if Guinness had said they wouldn’t promote Ireland or Toblerone saying they wouldn’t promote Switzerland.’
Mr Tunnock, 82, who backed the Union during the 2014 referendum debate, said his son-in-law had come up with the advert as a spoof on the Great British Bake Off.
But he later told Radio 2’s Jeremy Vine show: ‘We’re in Britain. We are advertising the Great British Tea Cake because we had a referendum here and 55 per cent of Scottish people wanted to be in Britain.’
Mr Tunnock said the lion rampant has not been removed from the packaging, as some people had suggested. And he said he had sent a box of the tea cakes to Nicola Sturgeon, David Cameron, and ‘the Labour man’ whose name he claimed not to recall [Jeremy Corbyn] for Christmas.
Discussing the effect of his comments during the independence debate, Mr Tunnock said: ‘I did get a few letters from folk saying “our extended family of 11 will never buy another tea cake”, but since then we’ve sold even more and more.’
Jacques de Cock, of the London School of Marketing, said: ‘I hope for Tunnock’s it is simply a storm in a teacup but it should avoid criticising the people who love their brand and saying they did not mean it.’
‘You can annoy people quite easily’