Premier Foods boss Gavin Darby is a marketing expert. His experience started back in the 80s at Spillers Foods and includes time in what must be one of the most coveted roles in the business – marketing director at Coca-Cola.

This makes it easy to imagine he had a hand in ads that appeared in some of yesterday’s newspapers and read: “Mr Kipling doesn’t do rumours, but he does make exceedingly good cakes”.

Mr Kipling ad full

The ads were a response to a story that started in the Telegraph at the weekend when an interviewer asked Darby about his plans for the Mr Kipling brand.

I have interviewed Darby myself and reckon he’s a pretty straight-talker. So, when he told the Telegraph “it is possible” the ‘exceedingly good cakes’ slogan might be replaced, I’d say he was being as frank as he could at the time. And Premier yesterday told me it still hadn’t finalised details of its new Mr Kipling campaign and still couldn’t say whether the old slogan will make an appearance.

To be fair to the Telegraph, its report merely said the slogan “could disappear” but the story quickly snowballed, and papers including the Mail and Mirror were carrying headlines stating the slogan was being ditched. ‘Battenberks’ declared The Sun, as only The Sun can.

Some reports suggested this would be the first time in 50-odd years that the slogan had been dropped – which also wasn’t entirely accurate. The Grocer reported five years ago that it was being replaced with the phrase ‘exceedingly happy cakes’ – though that didn’t last.

Meanwhile, Golden Wonder (often quick off the mark when it comes to social media opportunities) tweeted a picture of one of its products branded “exceedingly good crisps”, alongside the comment: “Well… if Mr Kipling isn’t going to use it…”.

We’ll never know if it was such tongue-in-cheek activity by another brand – or even The Sun’s headline – that prompted Premier to take out the ads in yesterday’s press, but it was a clever response and seems to have worked.

One of my colleagues suggested the ads were a little too clever, in fact, and that many who saw them in today’s papers wouldn’t have understood the reference, but I don’t think they were aimed at the general public. The ads were there to catch the attention of trade and consumer media who have today been running articles (such as this one), making Premier’s ‘wait-and-see’ position clear.

Dare I say, it was a job exceedingly well done.

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