The Auburn Hills, Mich. automaker and its aftermarket division, Mopar, are introducing a suite of free apps for smartphones that cover everything from vehicle owner info to aftermarket-customization product catalogues from Mopar. "We are taking owner information and customer care to a new level," said Pietro Gorlier, president and CEO of Mopar, in a webcast. He said the program is an industry first. "We are creating a channel of communication with customers about brands, vehicles and customer care." The apps have product-feature video demonstrations, connections with other owners, and access to customer care and 24-hour roadside assistance, among a host of other functions, per the company. The product, via Michigan-based Tweddle Group, is launching in tandem with the new 2011 Jeep Grand Cherokee and will be available at the iStore on June 19 first for iPhone and later for BlackBerry and Android on AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile and Sprint. The automaker says the apps will be expanded to other Chrysler, Dodge, Fiat, Jeep and Ram Truck vehicles in the U.S. by the end of this year. The apps are intended to complement physical user guides and DVDs that come with content one would expect from an owner's manual, including maintenance schedules, service contract details, warning-light interpretation, warranty information and customer assistance. But Gorlier said they include an on-demand channel for two-way communication on brands, vehicles, and customer service, plus Mopar parts and accessories, product brand gear and merchandise and social media sites. The main screen of the app has 10 functional categories starting with "vehicle highlights" and ending with "customer assistance." The app also has a section for -- in the case of the app for Grand Cherokee -- buying Jeep-branded accessories, apparel and gear, and a section that connects the user to Jeep communities on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and Jeep's blog. Jim Ford, head of technical service development, said that the free app, available at iStore, is also intended as a sales tool, as it is available to anyone, not just owners. "It's for anyone who might be interested in a Grand Cherokee and might want to learn a little more about it and its features," he said. Gorlier said the app can be played on iPad. "However, similar to all other apps, imagery from apps cannot be fully optimized on the iPad." He said he did not expect the app to slow traffic to dealerships. "We think it will enhance the traffic, giving the customer the opportunity to learn about the vehicle on their smartphone first and then visit the dealership to experience the vehicle."
It's crunch time at Kettle Brand Potato Chips. The brand's new "Crunch Proud" campaign -- centered on the launch of a virtual "Loud Food Club" tied in with social media and in-store promotions -- is all about "celebrating the crunch" that is one of the distinctive attributes most loved by Kettle's fans, says Kettle brand director Julie Dunmire. "We wanted to harness that attribute in a fun way, and we came up with the idea of some kind of club headed by a 'super fan,'" she says. The resulting Loud Food Club is housed on a microsite whose name trumpets the core message: CrunchProud.com. The club offers several levels of engagement, points out Scott Coe, account director for Kettle's new agency, Denver-based Cultivator Advertising & Design. Site visitors are greeted by that anonymous "super fan"/club leader, armed with a bullhorn, who urges them to join the club and "crunch loud and crunch proud with fellow crunch fans" who "aren't afraid to cause a ruckus and crunch with pride in public." To join, fans are asked to take a pledge ("I promise to break the silence of snacking ...") and download a club membership kit that includes an interoffice disclaimer email, pictographic "crunch courtesy" instructions, an LFC pencil flag, and "Loud Food Crunch Caution" signage. Another tab offers information about the hand-crafted method used to make the chips -- the key to their crunch factor -- and the quality of the potatoes and all-natural seasonings used ("all-natural" being a core brand promise for Kettle, which is the #1 natural potato chip brand, according to Nielsen). Members can also witness a "crunch-off" in which Kettle's noise is pitted against other loud sounds (including a monster truck, a lion's roar and an electric guitar), access a $1 coupon, and enter a sweeps for the chance to win a full year's supply of the chips. Club members are, of course, also encouraged to use Facebook and Twitter to recruit other proud crunchers, and the brand's Facebook page and Twitter account are being employed to drive fans to click into the microsite, become club members and enter the free chips sweeps. Heavy social media usage is nothing new for Kettle, which posts and tweets continuously and makes a point of launching new engagement campaigns every few months to tap into and build on the brand's "huge fan love," says Dunmire. The summer "Crunch Proud" campaign will be replaced by a new approach come fall, and the Loud Noises Club, while ongoing, is expected to "grow organically" among Kettle's customer base, rather than be a main focus of future efforts, she explains. The current campaign, targeting moms and men, also includes supermarket in-store displays promoting the crunch proud message and the online club, as well as newspaper FSI's. In February, Salem, Ore.-based Kettle Foods, Inc. was acquired from Lion Capital LLP by Diamond Foods, Inc., and now operates as a Diamond subsidiary. Kettle reported audited consolidated earnings of $250.5 million for the fiscal year ending September 2009 (up from $236.1 million in the previous fiscal), according to BusinessWeek. Kettle's portfolio includes four varieties and more than 20 flavors of all-natural potato chips, plus nut butters and trail mixes. Its products are distributed in North America, Japan, Western Europe and the U.K.
Pepsi's social-media juggernaut continues this year with a focus on applying social efforts to the smaller brands in its portfolio. Speaking Thursday at MediaPost Communications' OMMA Social day-long forum, Bonin Bough, director of digital and social media at PepsiCo, said the company has become the biggest sponsor of some of the largest digital events, including BlogHer, Blogworld, SXSW, and Internet Week NY, where it has 125 people on staff. "At SXSW, we did things with social communicators, and had a mini-army of PepsiCo folks doing internal blogs so the entire organization is participating on some level. In the beginning, when we started going to these, it was about building competency of listening, and bringing that into the organization." The company last week launched PepsiCo 10, designed to bring in new ideas via an open call for partners among emerging tech companies. Bough also established a "Mission Control Center" for Gatorade that takes the brand's pulse 24/7. The center, which looks very much like a NASA control room, tracks in real time analytics for campaigns, Web sites, or social channels. Bough says the focus is on creating the largest sports brand in the world and one that goes beyond the liquid product. "The question is," he said, "how do we create this in terms of real time insights?" The center has six monitors and five people across different functions. "We are asking how do we create a Petri dish for discovering what new technology will mean to the brand; how do we challenge existing realities?" Per Bough, a company's willingness to experiment on both a large and small scale implies a willingness to fail on occasion, something with which Pepsi is well-acquainted. "If you visit our headquarters, the walls are lined with products and packaging that didn't work," he said. Recent such experiments include a Twitter and TV media strategy for the one-off Pepsuber ad during this year's Super Bowl. "We ran in isolation of paid digital media," he said of the effort. "All we did was Twitter and drove nearly the same amount of traffic [as with paid digital]. Just with Twitter. I believe in doing small experiments and rolling them out in a big way." He noted that the Trop50 program started as a partnership with BlogHer, which has a combined reach of 15 million unique visitors. The company created The Juice online community around a "More of what you want, less of what you don't" theme. "We tracked versus traditional to see if we could prove that if we co-create something with a community around health, family, and relationships, we could improve brand awareness, equity and volume. When we looked at digital metrics, it was through the roof." Bough said PepsiCo is going to start a program this year wherein consumers who scan bar codes on PepsiCo products via smartphones will get content about the brand or corporate goodwill programs.
Micro-management doesn't pay, at least when it comes to the new consumer product goods creative process, according to new research from The Nielsen Company. Nielsen's research on the innovation processes at 360 large, U.S. CPG companies found that those with less senior management involvement in the idea-generation stage of the new product development process generate 80% more new product revenue than those with heavy senior management involvement. Overall, Nielsen found that companies that take a hands-off approach with product development incubation and also employ other innovation best practices, on average derive 650% more revenue from new products than companies that do not follow these practices. Putting physical distance between senior management and "blue sky" innovation teams to avoid stifling new-idea generation is also critical to success, according to the results presented Wednesday at Nielsen's Consumer 360 Conference. In fact, the data show that companies would actually be better off having no such innovation teams than locating them at corporate headquarters. Those with on-site innovation teams report that 5.7% of revenues come from new products, compared to 4.8% for those that do not have such teams and just 2.7% for those who house their innovators on site. The bottom line: Senior management's focus within the innovation arena should be on precisely managing the new-product development process after ideas are on the table. Companies with rigid development stage gates that require that a new product pass specific criteria before proceeding to the next stage average 30% more new product revenue than companies with "loose" processes, according to the study. Those with the strongest records of new product success tend to have two to three stage gates that are strictly followed across the organization. The first stage gate is typically designed to identify ideas that will then be developed into a concept and prototype, while the last is usually designed to determine whether a product should be committed to production and market. Other key innovation best practices among the two dozen identified include: a focus on growing brands, rather than acquiring them or having senior management "designate" them; a focus on product development two to three years out; a formal scorecard to provide structure to organizational learning; a standardized, mandatory post-mortem on all new product development efforts; and a knowledge management system to retain learnings from previous product launches. Far from being serendipitous, successful innovation track records are achieved by companies that "go to great lengths to create an ideal creative environment and the right behaviors, supporting policies and procedures," summed up Nielsen SVP and Managing Director Tom Agan. "When they execute well, the best ideas rise to the surface and into consumers' homes." The Nielsen study documented more than 50 dimensions of new product development. Objective survey results were compared to actual in-market success and the percent of revenue from new UPC's in fourth-quarter 2009.
In a bid to reach a younger demographic (which may not be familiar with its products), Toshiba America Consumer Products has entered into a cross-promotional arrangement with Dark Horse comics and USA Today. "We've always skewed a little but more toward an older audience. One of our objects is to skew younger," Maria Repole, vice president of communications for Toshiba, tells Marketing Daily. "This gives some personality to the brand; traditionally, our advertising has been focused on the product." The partnership, DH:HD, launched on Wednesday, with a sneak preview of Dark Horse's graphic novel Troublemaker by Janet and Alex Evanovich in USA Today. Though Toshiba was listed along with the publication as presenting the preview, the brand's presence will become more prevalent at ComicCon July 22-25 in San Diego, Repole says. She wouldn't divulge many details of the program, but she did say one artist is working on illustrations that include Toshiba products. "It's going to really kick off and be solidified at ComicCon this year," she says. "Once we launch our 3D televisions, that will open up even more possibilities." The decision to partner with a comic book company came after Repole visited the fan convention -- where many movie studios and other entertainment companies preview upcoming releases for eager fans -- last year. "It's one of the few venues and events where you can get up close and personal with the talent," she says.
The Organic Consumers Association (OCA), an environmental watchdog group, says Whole Foods Market is taking action against greenwashing in its cosmetics aisle, and that its new standards will compel such brands as Avalon Organics, Nature's Gate and Giovanni to either change their labels or their formulations. "While the [U.S. Department of Agriculture] has said that it will address the problem of mislabeled organic personal care products, we're pleased Whole Foods has gone ahead and taken this action now," Ronnie Cummins, director of the Finland, Minn.-based group, tells Marketing Daily. "You can't let people use the word 'organic' as a marketing ploy -- we would never let food companies do that. And people are beginning to understand that what they put on their bodies has just as much impact on their health and environment as the foods they eat." Whole Foods did not respond to an emailed query, but the OCA posted a letter on its site that it says the Austin, Tex.-based retailer sent to vendors last week, which asks all personal care vendors that intend to make any "organic" claims on products to notify it by Aug. 1 of their plans to become compliant. It also says they will need to meet these stricter demands by June of next year. "We believe that the 'organic' claim used on personal care products should have very similar meaning to the 'organic' claim used on food products, which is currently regulated by the USDA's National Organic Program. Our shoppers do not expect the definition of 'organic' to change substantially between the food and the non-food aisles of our stores," it says. Avalon, Nature's Gate, and Giovanni, which are all currently sold at Whole Foods and were all called out by the OCA as making "organic claims on products whose main cleansing and moisturizing ingredients are generally made without any organic material whatsoever and are usually composed in significant part [of] petrochemicals," did not respond to interview requests. Cummins says he expects other retailers to make similar demands, and that marketers will comply, even before the new federal guidelines come out. "It doesn't make sense -- will companies want to have one label for Whole Foods, and another for Trader Joe's? We're asking other retailers to do the right thing. In the long run, stores can only retain customer loyalty by being ethical -- why would a customer trust claims that produce or pet food is organic, when stores are willingly selling mislabeled cosmetics products?"
World's Best Cat Litter is expanding its "Buy The Best. Or Smell The Rest" direct response TV campaign to include print and online ads. Consumers have been downloading free trial coupons for the all-natural, whole-kernel corn cat litter in record numbers, says Paul Zobel, director of sales and marketing for World's Best Cat Litter, produced by Muscatine, Iowa-based GPC Pet Products. "We aim to reach cat owners using a combination of media including direct response TV, online banner ads, and magazine and newspaper advertising," Zobel says. "We were thrilled to see the TV viewers' responsiveness and, due to its success, decided to expand this rebate offer via other media through September." With the mail-in rebate, people obtain a free bag of the cat litter. Viewers can participate in the program at www.worldsbestcatlitter.com. A TV spot will run on Animal Planet, Discovery, National Geographic and the Weather Channel, directing viewers to go online to download the mail-in rebate. The corresponding print ads will run in lifestyle publications including People, Reader's Digest, Us Weekly and Martha Stewart Living. Free-standing inserts will run in more than 400 newspapers nationwide. Online banner ads will run via lifestyle, pet and women's sites to provide links to the mail-in rebate offer. World's Best Cat Litter bills itself as the only "all-natural" litter with a patented formula that harnesses the microporous power of all-natural, whole-kernel corn to provide unsurpassed odor control, compact clumping on contact (easy clean up), long-lasting use (two to three times longer than other clumping litters, using less litter and saving money) and a safer solution for pets, people and the planet. Unlike most cat litters that are mined from clay or artificially produced, it is available in pet specialty stores (PetSmart and PETCO), independent pet stores and select grocery stores.
The Top 10 DMAs in which reside adults who used the services of a real estate agent in the last 12 months: 1 Philadelphia 2 Minneapolis/ St. Paul 3 Austin, Texas 4 Denver 5 Salt Lake City 6 Atlanta 7 Phoenix (Prescott), Ariz. 8 Kansas City, Mo./ Kan. 9 Colorado Springs/ Pueblo, Colo. 10 Las Vegas Source: GfK MRI's Market-by-Market study, www.gfkmri.com
Even as we pull out of the economic downturn, many people are still curtailing spending because a new meaning of "value" is taking hold. This shift is particularly prominent among what we call the "Post-88s" -- females, age 22 and under -- who have grown up with social media. Their story of self-identity and its impact on value is so distinct from the older half of the Gen Y population that they can no longer be considered as one market. Count the Post-88s at the head of the pack when it comes to seeking to discover and express more of their true identity. For them to approve a product, it must reflect and expand these young women's sense of authenticity. Everything else is simply lost in translation. Internet, a collection of tools to expand self While marketers regard the Internet as a sales tool, young women see it as a collection of tools to help them expand their sense of self. Social networks have provided them a way to find like-minded others, peers, who validate their identity and its idiosyncratic displays, even though it may be different than the norm. Young women are no longer forced to subvert their inner truths to accommodate man-made, mass-media fantasies and expectations. The online experience has given young females permission to talk among themselves. Their access to validation, alternative viewpoints and support has expanded from local to global. They have at last been freed from consensually agreed-upon, mass-produced versions of reality. All the musts, oughts and shoulds these females have been pressured by have been torn asunder by social media. All the superficial, sliced-and-diced definitions of gender, sexiness, fashion, style and design have become irrelevant. In the face of such notions, they are shouting, "That's not right for me." There is also an irony operating; the silver-lining to online is that without the intrusion of the body that inevitably gets in the way in face-to-face interactions, these young females are freer to explore their identities, beliefs and attachments. They establish a sense of self far beyond looks, economic standing, race or what brand of handbag they prefer. Marketers must discover new truths To be successful tomorrow, marketers today must stop manufacturing and start discovering the needs and desires of the Post-88 female. What is femaleness? What does it mean to want to be a girl? What does it mean to be comfortable being a young adult female? What is sexy to a girl? What does it mean to be true to oneself? Certainly the answers will not be found devoting one's life to the pursuit of the perfect body, perfect hair, the perfect man and the perfect house -- at least how marketers define "perfect" today. The post-1988 female knows these traditional pursuits do not necessarily lead to happiness. The new complexity requires understanding how the Post-88 female rides the cusp between silly and serious; sexy and smart; pretty and powerful. For example, make-up usage is now not usually put on to produce perfection, and cosmetics are best not signified and aspirationally portrayed by the mass acclaimed celebrity. Brittany or Cameron is not the base coin of the young female. Make-up to them is more fun and playful, as opposed to satisfying any pre-conceived ideal. A similar dynamic is at work in what these Post-88s want from their smartphones: function and fun. And as far as business dress, the question is, what to wear when a suit doesn't suit you? Other product domains should also take heed. Even for the younger female, toys need not only to be cute, but also penetrating. For the older, young adult, who for the first time might be furnishing an apartment, almost all of the furniture in her price range seems over- processed, instead of allowing for discovering one's "look." It's not "new" and "more" that these girls are looking for as much as it is expressing themselves in the design of their environment, both self and sofa with a patina that gets better with age. The Post-88 female wants to feel good about her choices, existential or mundane. If marketers want to increase the return on investment for their product development and advertising dollars, they will have to understand the identities of what this young adult calls "me." To create products that are not yet on the shelves that girls will approve of calls for a deeper understanding of this population than designers and marketers now exhibit. Every product aimed at the Post-1988 female will have to demonstrate to these girls that "I get you." Only then will the girls commit. The "Post-1988" who came of age at the dawn of social media want what makes her more of her and makes her female. She wants "me-as-me," as an individual and as a way to belong. She'll buy into that with her increasing purchasing power.