Florette is set to launch its biggest-ever marketing campaign next year a £5m push to promote its bagged salads around key sporting events and the Queen’s Jubilee.

The campaign will feature national TV advertising, to be launched in April to coincide with the start of the salad season, as well as a celebrity spokesperson for the brand, whose identity will be revealed next year. Florette also plans to run on-pack promotions, alongside in-store sampling and a digital campaign.

With the Olympics, the UEFA European Football Championship, the Jubilee and Wimbledon all taking place next summer, 2012 presented a great opportunity to engage consumers with the bagged salad category, claimed Florette ­marketing manager Elaine Smith. “We are launching our ‘summer of sport’ ­activities to harness the ­celebrations of 2012 for our brand and for the category,” she said.

Aside from its summer activities, Florette will also re-run its Fresh New You print ­advertising campaign, which focuses on new year healthy eating, at the beginning of 2012. It also plans to launch new variants of Duo, its range of salad bags containing two varieties of salad leaves, this November, and use the range in a Valentine’s Day campaign in 2012.

Florette’s £5m spend on its activities in 2012 represents a £1.5m increase on this year’s marketing ­budget.

In addition, Florette is running trials with two of the major mults this autumn to test different approaches to merchandising bagged salad. Category manager Tony Walsh said Florette’s research had shown shoppers found the salad fixture difficult to navigate and that they were reluctant to experiment with new varieties.

Florette wanted to test whether remerchandising the category through grouping similar leaf types together and adding on-shelf flashes with information about different leaves would help consumers shop the category more widely.