In the English nursery rhyme that has amused generations of young children, Goldilocks is the girl who stumbles on the home of a respectable bear family when they are out on a prowl. She messes up their furniture, eats their porridge, and falls asleep on one of their beds, but soon wakes up and runs for her life when the bears return, angered by her intrusion into their privacy.

Not many grownups in the Philippines will perhaps remember the lesson of this little morality tale, but the name and image of the golden-haired intruder is today firmly etched in the Filipino consumer’s mind as a symbol for good food and celebrations.

And the Goldilocks brand has become not only a family icon for get-togetherness but a P6-billion company that serves good, affordably-priced foods—from cakes, pastas, and noodles to Filipino-style ready-to-eat meals and snacks.

It was to achieve easy recall that the founders of Goldilocks, Milagros and Clarita Leelin, chose Goldilocks as the name for a small cake shop that they opened in 1966 in a one-door apartment in Makati (now a city). They wanted a name that could have a strong, immediate appeal to their primary target market: mothers and children. They also wanted it to bring to mind prosperity and good luck.

They picked “Goldilocks” because it met those two criteria. It was not only the name of a character of a very popular nursery rhyme but it had the prosperous-sounding syllables “gold” and “lock.” Being of Chinese descent, the two Leelins considered gold as a color of prosperity, and “lock” was, well, a word that to them sounded like “luck” as well. The logic was perhaps something like “Lock in the gold for luck.” As Pinky Yee, the Goldilocks marketing director, explains, “They liked ‘Goldilocks’ because of the double meaning.”

The Leelins might have stretched word meanings when they picked Goldilocks as a brand name, but they stuck with that name for good during the next 40 years. The cake shop grew into a major food-service company in the Philippines.

From a startup capital of P10,000 and first day sales of P574 (equivalent to roughly P366,300 and P21,025 today, when adjusted for inflation), Goldilocks now grosses over P6 billion in annual sales and has a total of 208 stores nationwide, nearly 70 percent of them franchised outlets.

It has also expanded its business overseas, opening 17 Goldilocks stores in the United States and one in Canada. No doubt, the Goldilocks name has brought prosperity and luck to the Leelins in more ways than they could have imagined.

PINKY YEE: "[The founders] liked 'Goldilocks' because of the double meaning."

The target market of Goldilocks has always been the Filipino family, and its products have through the years become an enduring part of the various milestones of Filipino life. Today, there is a Goldilocks product to serve for every occasion, whether for a birthday, a wedding anniversary, a graduation party, a visit to an ailing relative in the hospital, or any occasion at all. More than that, the fare served by Goldilocks can either be eaten on-premise or taken home.

So pervasive has Goldilocks become in the Philippine market that a recent study by the international market research firm AC Nielsen showed that 10 out of every 10 Filipinos would mention Goldilocks when asked to enumerate all the bakeshops they know, and eight of those 10 would mention the name Goldilocks first. In marketing terms, that translates to a brand awareness of 100 percent and a top-of- mind awareness of 80 percent.

Even more surprising about these awareness levels is that Goldilocks had never really advertised or promoted the company and its products until 20 years into the business. “The founders of the company never imagined the family business to become this big,” Yee says. “They just wanted to bake and relied simply on word-of-mouth from satisfied customers to promote their cakes. In fact, they decided to formally advertise their products only in 1987. That was when they hired their very first advertising agency.”

Until then, Goldilocks grew the business by simply banking on the quality and consistency of its food products and customer service. Yee explains: “Quality—not the opening of so many stores every year—is the key ingredient of the Goldilocks success story. This is why we always ensure that when we open another outlet or establish our presence in other key cities outside Metro Manila, we keep our promise of quality to the end-customer. For instance, the brazo de mercedes [a Spanish-style cake] our customers enjoyed 40 years ago is still very much the same brazo de mercedes they enjoy today.”

The brand equity of Goldilocks has always been anchored on love, caring, and thoughtfulness. Even long before going into formal product advertising, the company had already clearly recognized that its typical customer would buy Goldilocks products not so much for himself or herself as for somebody else.

“The Pinoy is very thoughtful,” says Yee. This Filipino attribute of bringing pasalubong (token bring-home gifts) to loved ones, in fact, became the primary basis for the Goldilocks marketing communications program when the company finally decided to actively promote its large number of product offerings. It gave rise to the tagline “How thoughtful, how Goldilocks”—the creative expression of a 1995 focus group discussion that found “thoughtfulness” as a common trait shared by Goldilocks customers.

From then onwards, that tagline stayed on as the underlying theme of all of the company’s brand-building efforts.

Goldilocks hammered on the “How thoughtful, how Goldilocks” tagline for several years, after which it modified the tagline into a more nationalistic theme: “How Goldilocks, How Pinoy.” Says Yee of that new advertising approach: “We needed to tell the world that the Filipino is particularly thoughtful and would actually go out of his way to show it.” That campaign proved highly successful, making Goldilocks the default pasalubong for Filipinos not only in their own country but in foreign countries as well.

Karen de Asis, chief brand strategist and learning officer of MKS Training and Consulting, comments on the pasalubong concept: “It is a marketing handle that Goldilocks has successfully used to differentiate itself from other snack foods. It succeeded because it is a very relevant value proposition that also happens to be very Filipino.”

Another consumer insight on which Goldilocks had based a recent marketing communication campaign is the Filipino’s “bitbit” mindset. This Tagalog term roughly translates as the lugging of presents for people one is visiting or doing business with—a trait clearly observable in the way traveling Filipinos bring bottles of, say, bagoong (Filipino-style shrimp paste) or a box of dried mangoes as presents to family members, friends, or business associates.

Still another successful Goldilocks theme is the Tagalog tagline “Ang sarap magmahal ng Pinoy,” which roughly translates into “The Pinoy loves in such delicious ways.” This time, Goldilocks went deeper into why and what makes the Filipino so thoughtful.

“By using the new tagline, we are expressing the fact that the Filipinos’ habit of giving take-home presents is not only a sign of thoughtfulness but a unique way of showing how much they love their loved ones,” says Yee.

Despite the emergence of so many low-price competitors in the fast-foods retail and franchising market, Goldilocks has kept a strong hold on its target markets. People continue to flock to Goldilocks for its wide range of food offerings, many of which are precisely the same kinds of food that Goldilocks customers have enjoyed over the past 40 years. The company’s open secret to this strong popularity of Goldilocks is quality, consistency, and affordable pricing.

“There are some things you don’t sacrifice, and quality is one of them,” Yee says. “When raw material prices go up and you change the product to cut down on costs, the customers can detect that. Goldilocks will never do that. We have always been true to our customers.”

Contact details:

GOLDILOCKS BAKESHOP, INC.
Telephone: (02) 532-2718
E-mail: customer@goldilocks.com.ph
Website: www.goldilocks.com.ph

KAREN DE ASIS
Chief Brand Strategist
MKS CONSULTING
Mobile: 0917-6278138
Website: www.karendeasis.com