Chiquita|Faces

A great case study for injecting fun into a brand....

Chiquita. Their bananas easily identifiable by the blue sticker, which has been placed by hand on every single banana since 1963, and has been used as a promotional tool over the years. The latest sticker campaign, created by DJ Neff uses the shape of the sticker to create more than twenty kooky characters and serves as the basis for a significant online attraction.

Chiquita's latest ad campaign imbues its audience with an instant sense of wonder. Using playful illustrations on stickers juxtaposed to the iconic Chiquita stickers, the product and brand become more engaging to the consumer—plus they just look cool. The cornerstone of the campaign relied on the little blue stickers, the biggest icon for the brand, and the biggest way to get the word out. 


"Dont Let Another Good Banana Go Bad" was the through line of our campaign and it was incorporated into all of our work. The idea grew into a fully immersive microsite that contained viral videos, a sticker generator, and a completely unique 3D flash game called Banana Boogie Battle. This experience gave the users opportunities to create their own banana sticker personality and breakdance battle against bananas that have turned to the dark side.






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Above: skateboard graphics










Client: Chiquita Banana
Campaign Name: Eatachiquita
Creative Direction: DJ Neff, Mark KrajanArt Direction: DJ NeffDesigners: Hillary Coe, Luis GonzalezContributing Designers: Dyanna Csaposs, Nick Perata, Roscoe FergusonDevelopers: Neil Katz, Chris Isom, Isaac DettmanCG Developers: Kyle Figgins, Ryan Kaplan, Steve Han, Gene ArvanProduction Company: The Famous Group

Absolut|I’m here…

I’m here – a love story in an Absolut world… – a movie supported by Absolut, shot by Spike Jonze.

1. A trailer:

2. A book:

3. A window display:

4. A web site:

5. A blog:

Miele Washing Machine| Silent night

" Dream clean dreams.
Miele W 1754 with extra silent washing programme.

Brief: Create attention and interest about MIELEs latest washing machine, Miele W 1754, with extra silent washing programme.
Solution: Based on the insight that washing clothes during night time can be very disturbing, we created an ad to emphasize that fact. The clothes became a moon.

Advertising Agency: Jung von Matt, Stockholm, Sweden
Creative Director: Johan Jäger
Art Director: Johan Gustafsson
Copywriter: Petter Dixelius
Photographer: RBLS
Published: February 2010

Campbell Soup Co.|Neuromarketing

Soup is a product you probably don’t lust for. Sure, a hot bowl of soup is nice after a chilly job of shoveling snow out of the driveway, but rarely is it more than an afterthought, or a quick prelude to a more interesting main course. If you are Campbell Soup Co., though, you DO spend a lot of time thinking about soup. And, as detailed by the Wall Street Journal, they want to understand YOUR hidden feelings about soup to improve their packaging:

Campbell’s marketers were stymied by several problems. First, consumers just didn’t think much about soup, making meaningful market research difficult. Furthermore, they found that traditional market research techniques like asking about ad recall and intent to purchase seemed to correlate poorly with actual buyer behavior. (That shouldn’t come as a shock to regular Neuromarketingreaders.) So, they turned to neuromarketing and biometric research:

By 2008 Mr. Woodard settled on the biometric tools combined with a different type of deep interview to more accurately gauge which consumer communications worked better. Campbell then hired Innerscope Research Inc., a Boston company that measures bodily responses, and other firms to help conduct research.

To be sure, neuromarketing techniques have their doubters. And biometrics tell only if a person reacted to something, not whether they liked or disliked something, and sample sizes tend to be small.

Carl Marci, an Innerscope founder, says his tools can’ t pinpoint what emotions a person feels. But if all the biological metrics move simultaneously in the same direction, the subject is likely to be emotionally engaging with something. [From The Wall Street Journal - The Emotional Quotient of Soup Shopping by Ilan Brat.]

Campbell knew that people actually had a warm emotional feeling about their products. (When you were sick or cold, your mother fed you soup, right? Maybe even Campbell’s soup.) But biometric monitoring showed that this warmth faded in the supermarket soup aisle when the consumer was confronted with a wall of nearly identical red and white cans. So, Campbell started evaluating a series of design changes while monitoring how consumers responded to them.

Based on their biometric testing, Campbell will soon begin rolling out new displays and packaging to try to connect better with customers’ emotions. Key characteristics are:

• Different color packaging for different lines of soups.
• A smaller logo.
• Spoons won’t be pictured.
• Soup pictures will be more vibrant and “steamy.”

Hats off to the Wall Street Journal and reporter Ilan Brat for getting Campbell to go on record for this interesting story that documents the failure of traditional market research and how biometric techniques were used to make specific marketing changes. We hope there’s a follow-up story in a year or so to document the effects of the new displays and packaging.

Beginning this summer and into next year, consumers shopping at grocery stores will encounter a new experience in the soup isle. The Campbell Soup Co. has put the focus on selling more of its condensed soups in the U.S. by redefining the shopping experience, enhancing quality, offering healthier choices, refreshing packaging and launching new marketing initiatives.

The company spent months listening to consumers, photographing its various soups to visually define the ultimate comfort moment when a warm bowl of soup arrives on the kitchen table and rewriting its advertising and promotion. It employed New Age techniques like biometrics and ethnographics to measure consumer response to its soups, packaging and shopping experience and to go head-to-head against the simple meals category.

The result is a well-structured plan affecting more than 60% of the condensed soup line that will play out in soup isles at 24,000 grocery stores boosting a soup portfolio business that generated more than $1 billion in net sales in fiscal 2009.

"We are now in a position to reframe the way we compete in the broader simple meals category," Douglas R. Conant, Campbell’s President and CEO, said, in a release. "Our new marketing efforts will further position soup as a key part of a healthy, well-balanced simple meal and help consumers make more informed choices. We will build on the success of our high-margin, market-leading condensed soup franchise—enhancing its quality, making it healthier and increasing its relevance."

The familiar red and white colors on labels will remain, but changes to other visual elements will evoke a new and different way for consumers to think about Campbell’s condensed soup.  The shelving systems at national retailers will be redesigned.

New ads will position soup and dishes made with soup as a simple meal. The campaign will highlight the fact that soups are an affordable, tasty and nourishing alternative versus several other popular simple meals. It will also promote the fact that the vegetables in "its soup are grown on American farms.

The new initiative improves on substantial investment Campbell’s has made over the last several years that have helped increase net sales of U.S. soup every year since 2003.

Real Leaders Don't Do Focus Groups

Via HarvardBusiness.org by Dan Pallotta

Apple is famous for not engaging in the focus-grouping that defines most business product and marketing strategy. Which is partly why Apples products and advertising are so insanely great. They have the courage of their own convictions, instead of the opinions of everyone else's whims. On the subject, Steve Jobs loves to quote Henry Ford who once said that if he had asked people what they wanted they would have said "a faster horse."
Focus groups are all about reference points. Make it more like this, less like that. Whether it's business, social business, or charity, breakthroughs are defined by the absence of reference points, and leadership is defined by the courage to leave all of the reference points behind.
That's why it's so rare.
In 1993 my company created the first multiday charitable event that required a four-figure minimum pledge. It created what has become a $250 million a year industry — and that's counting only the fundraising. That first event was called California AIDSRide. The offer was simple: Ride your bike for seven days and 600 miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles, sleep in a tent each night, and raise a minimum of $2,000 for the privilege. If we had ever focus-grouped, the event would never have gone forward. The number of people, even in our target, who were prepared to say "yes" to the proposition on the basis of the proposition alone was less than one in a hundred. Maybe less than one in a thousand. If we had done five focus groups of 20 people each, we would have found one person — maybe — who would have said yes. And that would have been the end of it. Or the idea's demise could have been slow suffocation: We would have found plenty of people who'd have said, "I'd do it if you reduce it to a one-day ride," or "I'd do it if I could raise whatever amount I want," or "I'd do it if I could go on one a leg of the trip." Basically, I'll do it if you transform the bold idea you came in here with into something I'm more comfortable and familiar with.
So we never focus-grouped it. Instead, we went out and told people we were doing it and invited them to come. There's a profound difference between asking people what they think of an idea in the abstract versus telling them, "Here it is." The former is following, the latter is leading. People respond to leadership.
They say that the medium is the message. A focus group is a medium. And it lacks the magic of commitment. A full-page ad in the Los Angeles times that says, This Is It, is a message in and of itself. And it's loaded with commitment. You'll never find out the existential truth about anything — a product, service, or anything else — by sending the wrong message. It's the difference between "Will you marry me?" and "I'm trying to decide whether or not to marry you on the basis of whether or not you will say yes to me. I'm not really asking you, but what would you say if I did, hypothetically?
Imagine if they focus-grouped the iPhone:
"Can't you have a physical keyboard that slides out of the back, like all of the other phones?"
Imagine if they focus-grouped Disneyland:
"Can't you make it so I can see everything in a day?"
Imagine if the focus-grouped the Apollo program:
"I think the goal should be 20 years instead of 10."
Imagine if they focus-grouped any of the things that really inspire us. Imagine if they put all of the comfortable reference points back in for us.
Take people to the places where there are no reference points, and leave the focus groups — and the competition — behind.

Cadbury|Creme Egg|Getting the goo out

Cadbury launches a digital treasure hunt in a bit to drum up interest for its Creme Eggs


That time of year has rolled around again. Creme Egg advertisements are being rolled out so it must be near Easter, This time Cadbury’s has produced a dedicated website.

The confectionary manufacturer is sticking with the story that proved so popular last year – Cadbury Crème Eggs have escaped and are on a mission to release their goo. Cue the strapline – your country need goo!

As with last year, visitors to the website can follow all the egg-sploits on the dedicated website but this time those pesky eggs have wandered even further They can be seen popping up on their websites such as MSN, Yahoo and YouTube. Once consumers have located the eggs they can enter a special code onto the dedicated website t win prizes such as spoons, beach balls, red letter days and a trip to New York. The campaign includes a quiz on Facebook and there are several games on the site to keep the most eggs-itable fans busy.

Cadbury’s are building on the success of a campaign that proved popular last year and looks likely to be again.

BRAND: Creme Egg

BRAND OWNER: Cadbury

CATEGORY: Confectionery/ Snacks

REGION: UK

DATE: Jan 2010

MEDIA AGENCY: CMW

MEDIA CHANNEL

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Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Cadbury Creme Egg :::Here today, goo tomorrow

BRAND OWNER:Cadbury
CATEGORY:Confectionery/ Snacks
REGION:UK
DATE:Jan 2008 - Mar 2008

With Easter coming early in 2008, Cadbury was keen to improve upon the previous year’s Creme Egg sales in a shorter sales period.

Cadbury was looking for a new way to engage with the target audience of 16-24 year olds, moving away from the 23 year old ‘how do you eat yours?’ campaign.

The key consumer insight was that people have a unique experience of the Creme Egg brand.

Unlike other chocolate products, Creme Egg brand values are lived through its consumption, developing a unique consumer connection.. For the youth audience Creme Egg is all about play, so the communication strategy was based on bringing Creme Egg to life through play.

The return of Creme Egg was announced through homepage takeovers, placement of the TV ads online, search, Yahoo spoof editorial and synchronized display formats targeted to the core audience.

Creme Egg integrated with Bebo’s hit online soap opera Kate Modern by creating a fake live event in central London. A Creme Egg Bebo profile page enabled consumer conversation and a place to host the Creme Egg content. It also specially commissioned episodes of cult online series Weebl and Bob and hosted it on movie-themed website goovies.co.uk. There were spoofs of cult films (including Goobusters, Goo and the City and the Wizard of Goo) and introduced the new Creme Egg character.

As a result, there were over 3.5m visits to the microsite, 120,000 WAP site visits and 105,000 mobile game downloads. 180 million more Creme Eggs were sold - a sales increase of 1.8% year-on-year.

Gillette|Uncut

Gillette goes for rock'n'roll imagery in latest celebrity fronted campaign.

Possibly in a move to counteract recent scandals involving members of their usual stable of clean-cut celebrity spokesmen, Gillette target the under 30s male grooming market with a series of music films featuring artists from the worlds of rock, punk and hip-hop.

Building on the idea that a man's grooming routine helps prepare him to take on the world and face any challenges with confidence, the campaign draws analogy with the preparations made by rock stars before they perform in front of an audience. Steve Fund, director of global marketing, promises that the films will “show a side of the artist that's rarely, if ever, seen – going backstage to show how they prepare, including styling and grooming, and the moments of doubt they experience before taking the stage.”

Greenlight Media & Marketing engaged the services of renowned photographer Danny Clinch, former protégé of Annie Leibovitz and a prolific director of live concert films. Clinch's short film, and the affiliated print campaign, features the All American Rejects, will.I.am of the Black Eyed Peas, Tim McGraw and Mark Hoppus from Blink-182 in their pre-show rituals. After a premiere in L.A, the campaign is set to air on the Fuse television network.

As a supplement to the Uncut launch, the Gillette website will also feature a series of light-hearted video tutorials, also featuring the musicians, where viewers can learn to “Shave Like a Rock Star”.

BRAND: Gillette

BRAND OWNER: Proctor & Gamble

CATEGORY: Toiletries/ Cosmetics

REGION: USA

DATE: Sep 2009

AGENCY: Greenlight Media & Marketing

MEDIA CHANNEL