Going Bananas over Cable
Dole Food Co. has traded in the pig for a pack of wild animals that will keep the brand running all year. The company this month kicks off a one-year promotion alliance with Discovery Channel, running three major promotions under the same theme, Go Real. The deal gives Dole a more consistent image than the one-off tie-ins it has been doing with entertainment properties like Babe: Pig in the City and Disney Records.
“We don’t have a big ad budget, so we needed to make our promotions work harder,” explains Marty Ordman, Dole director of promotions and special events. Entertainment tie-ins have worked well for the brand, but “we hopped from one property to another, and lacked a consistent message.” Discovery Channel has enough brand equity with families – and enough variety in its programming – to give Dole lots of material for corporate-wide promotions and “a nice platform for individual product promotions,” Ordman says. After all, Dole is one of the few brands that appears in grocery aisles (canned fruit), refrigerators (fresh juice), and the coveted produce department, the highest-traffic section of the store.
With annual sales topping $4.3 billion, Dole sold $516 million in canned fruits and bagged salad in the year ended Jan. 3, per Information Resources Inc., Chicago. Dole refrigerated juices registered $1.27 billion in sales for Tropicana, which licenses the Dole name.
Dole wanted a promotion partner with a wholesome, all-family image. So its agency, Chicago-based Flair Marketing, drew up a list of potential properties. Dole narrowed the wish list and picked Discovery Channel for its audience, image, and novelty. The cable TV provider is pretty newto promotional alliances, with just three campaigns in ’98 – tie-ins with Holiday Inn, Gap Kids, and S.C. Johnson – under its belt so far. “With movies, it’s easy to get lost in the clutter of the McDonald’s of the world,” Ordman says. “With Discovery Channel, I don’t feel like they’re going to be making deals with 50 other companies.”
Discovery is pretty picky about promotion partners. “We hear over and over from consumers who say ‘I know I can trust this if it comes from Discovery Channel,” says Robin Sayetta, vp-merchandising and promotion licensing. “The minute we put something out there that isn’t consistent with our brand, we would erode our equity.” To safeguard its brand, Discovery looks for category leaders, and follows what Sayetta calls “well-defined partnership criteria.” Marketers like Dole used to promoting with entertainment properties are sometimes thrown by Discovery’s guidelines. “We don’t have a licensed character, so it’s hard for them to see how we want to protect different images like we would protect a character. Once we explain the logic, partners really respect that.”
Westlake Village, CA-based Dole likes its promotion partners a little wet behind the ears. It teamed with Microsoft Corp. for a software offer in ’96, “just as they were getting up to speed with packaged goods companies,” Ordman says. Now, of course, Dole could hardly afford them.
The sky isn’t the limit Flair approached Discovery on Dole’s behalf, and negotiated the contract with Discovery Communications, which includes Nature Co. and Discovery Channel stores, Web sites, and publishing operations as well as the cable channel. Negotiations and promo planning took the whole summer; Dole’s brokers began selling it in last October. Flair had worked with Discovery Channel on a fall ’98 promo for S.C. Johnson, and “that opened a great dialogue,” says Flair president Allyn Miller. “We understood how they can promote a promotion.”
Discovery didn’t throw in any free airtime or require Dole to buy ads (although Ordman is considering it for fourth-quarter). Dole spent only $4.4 million on advertising through October, $1.6 million of it on cable TV, per Competitive Media Reporting, New York. Dole cut its ad budget an estimated 37 percent in ’98, and is expected to channel even more ad dollars into promotion this year. That makes promotional access to Discovery’s retail stores and its high-test Web site even more valuable to Dole.
But the biggest advantage is the company Discovery Channel keeps. The 14-year-old channel has some cool connections that can take Dole promotions into the stratosphere. Want a kids’ space camp promotion? Let’s call NASA. Want baby tigers for that sales meeting? Here’s an animal trainer in your neighborhood. That kind of Rolodex comes in handy for fulfilling one-of-a-kind prizes. Dole’s spring campaign includes an instant-win sweeps on 10 million packages of Greener Selection bagged salads giving away a trip with the film crew of Wild Discovery, the channel’s most popular show. “That’s the kind of very exclusive offer we can’t do with just another travel program or premium offer,” Ordman says.
An account-specific summer sweeps puts more perk in the pineapple with 120 Discovery trips to Hawaii. “It makes our Hawaiian heritage stronger and sexier with a Discovery Channel experience,” he says.
Dole also used the partnership to ditch its paper sales kits for CD-ROM-based pitches. For the first time, Dole gave its brokers CD-ROMs to customize presentations to grocers. It looks cooler and costs a lot less than the high-gloss packets that most grocery buyers dump right into the trash. “This is such a visual property, it’s a great place to start with CD-ROM presentations,” Ordman says. (Ironically, sources close to Dole rave over Discovery Channel’s glossy press kit.)
Dole plans to use only CD-ROMs for presentations now. The company did some new-product decks last year for items testing in only a handful of markets. “It seemed crazy to print up four-color brochures for only a dozen buyers,” so Dole gave the pitch via floppy disk instead, Ordman says. “This just brings it to the next level.”
Can a space walk be far behind?
