Mor is a sausage with reduced pork, so a lot less fat, and a whole lot of other tasty ingredients instead. Ingredients like beetroot, quinoa, kale, sundried tomato and cauliflower. Across the range, there are new tastes and flavours and importantly, the same loved sausage texture.

But achieving the ambitions of selling a healthier sausage, bringing more shoppers to the fixture and some newer ones to the category, would be no mean feat. And it wouldn’t be achieved by simply emulating premium own label or the market leading brand. This needed different thinking.

In a market where high meat content is the traditional sausage makers ambition, Mor positions reduced meat as a vision of what better can look like – a tasty option for those shifting towards healthier and more aware dietary choices. But less meat isn’t no meat so Mor could be sitting in a space between two established conventions.

Not afraid of the silence, Mor fills the gap with superfoods and inherently healthy ingredients that combine with the pork and the chicken to create sausages that snap and chew every bit as well as the premium versions, just tastier and with less guilt.

Being first to market is a double edged sword, especially against a sea of own label and branded Cumberland’s, Lincolnshire’s and 100% Pork’s. Mor’s focus is on what’s been added, not what’s been taken out.

Encouraging people to try Mor sausages was unlikely to be achieved by reminding them of they thought they’d miss. And low calorie shoppers don’t naturally gravitate to the sausage fixture. What was important was to be clear that with Mor sausages, there’s more inside, a lot more.

Creating a new criteria of choice for shoppers is a key part our challenger thinking programme.

In super competitive categories where shoppers make habitual or split second decisions, changing the narrative by giving shoppers something new to base their decisions on can be fruitful territory.

We turned the constraint of low meat content into a positive, by offering new favours with the same loved texture profiles, into a truly delicious and dare-to-be-different product that stood apart from the rest of category. In short, Mor offers a healthier alternative to the traditional banger without compromising on taste.

Mor sausages have challenged how the category thinks and behaves. The functionality of a banger for the BBQ or Toad lacks imagination and depth, Mor is here to excite, to re-imagine the possibilities of what a sausage can be and the meals shoppers can make with a renewed old favourite.

A mission to ‘Be More’ is the motivation behind the brand. Our vision is to create a community of ‘Morsters’, who have a commitment to achieve more from less: from sharing available resources, to simple life-hacks that add value to everyday living: we can all achieve more by consuming less.

Creating brands from the ground up demands focus and ambition. At Ape we deployed Gorilla Tactics our 5 step challenger thinking programme to:

• Clarify the ambition and flush out the constraints
• Define the positioning and opportunities
• Create the name, language and tone of voice
• Design the brand and packaging

The marker of a true challenger brand is rapid growth, at the end of year one from a standing start, Mor was nearing a brand value of £2m RSV, that’s a staggering £91 for every £1 spent on design.

Mor gained approx 4% of the premium branded sausage market and 25% of Mor shoppers are new to the fixture, so the brand even brought incremental growth for the whole category.

Brands can and should be more than simply beautiful to look at. Getting the foundations right at the very beginning is where success is built from.

At Ape we don’t just design lovely brands; we create, develop, launch and support them so they’re equipped to out-perform their competitors and categories.