How Mutti turned tinned tomatoes into a love story

In Mutti’s latest campaign, Sam Kerr begins with a sentence seldom heard in a tinned tomato advertisement: “I’m Sam Kerr, and this is a confession of a Muttiholic saucy story.” Soon she is in a hotel foyer, carrying Mutti Passata in her suitcase and eyeing Matteo, a chef whose jawline “could cut marble”. The script is ludicrous but entirely intentional. Samantha Filocamo, Mutti’s ANZ marketing director, says the campaign gives a 127-year-old Italian company a personality while capitalising on consumer-goods’ most dependable behaviour: Once shoppers find a brand they trust, they tend to stick with it. The tomato awakeningMutti’s Australian voice began to take shape in 2021 with its “When You Know, You Know” platform. Filocamo said flavour makes customers pay attention, and inside Mutti, that conversion has its own grand name, “the great tomato awakening”, the moment a customer discovers a better tomato and becomes evangelical about it. “To stand out in a crowded space, we made the intentional decision to move away from the conventional creative and messaging most would expect from a premium tomato brand,” Filocamo said. Mutti’s marketing comedy obviously grew from that conviction.The company behind the innuendo began near Parma in 1899, when brothers Marcellino and Callisto Mutti founded Fratelli Mutti as the family’s agricultural work moved into tomato processing. Their uncle Giovanni had already experimented with crop rotation, and in 1909, Marcellino’s son Ugo proposed a small factory making tomato extract, using newly refined vacuum-cooking techniques that allowed concentrate to be canned and preserved. Marcellino registered the two-lion trademark in 1911, then in 1951, Ugo added tomato concentrate in an aluminium tube whose cap doubled as a thimble.Sauce as serial entertainmentAustralian supermarkets have recently come under scrutiny over where their tomatoes come from. In July, an ABC Four Corners investigation revealed several tomato products marketed as Australian or Italian had in fact contained forensic profiles consistent with Chinese-grown tomatoes. Muti was among the brands that passed the testing. Filocamo added that the brand uses 100 per cent Italian tomatoes, picked and packed within 24 hours of harvest, and receives more than 800,000 quality checks each year. “In many ways, it is the seriousness of what goes into making the product that gives us permission to be playful,” Filocamo explained. “We can have fun with how we talk about Mutti because, when it comes to quality, we don’t play around.”Confessions of a Muttiholic grew from fans themselves when Mutti began seeking Australia’s most tomato-obsessed customers last year, first turning their stories into documentary-style films. This year, those confessions became Saucy Stories, an audio series written by romance author Emma Mugglestone and narrated by Kerr, famous tennis player Dylan Alcott and celebrity vet Dr Chris Brown. According to Mutti, the debut received more than 19.2 million views and drew hundreds of consumers’ submissions. Filocamo also said the company receives emails, calls, social messages and handwritten letters documenting “Mutti moments”; the brand has appeared at weddings, proposals, hens’ parties, in artworks and even tattoos.Alcott narrates a confession from someone convinced an engagement ring has been hidden inside a jar of Passata, and Brown takes on a story involving a tin-can telephone, a mysterious neighbour and linguine all’Arrabbiata. The casting turns customer behaviour into entertainment while giving each episode an Australian cadence. It explains the strategy beneath Kerr’s steamy paperback voice, Alcott’s engagement-ring jar and Brown’s flirtatious linguine. They are celebrities who earn attention, and meanwhile, the fandom creates participation, and shopper marketing turns both into utility. For Filocamo, keeping that attention comes back to a strong insight and a genuine brand truth. “Without that, a platform has very little chance of lasting,” she said. “For us, that truth has always been the passion people have for Mutti – once they understand the difference in the product.”