BRANDED MOMENTS

Sampling provides a morsel of brand experience along with a taste of the product.

There’s something about a cup of Starbucks coffee that a little old lady with a card table can’t do justice to. That’s why Kraft Foods – which began distributing Starbucks beans in supermarkets in 1998 – imports Bucks-trained “baristas,” the espresso jockeys that brew the Starbucks Experience, to grocery stores.

It’s part of a new recipe for sampling that serves a big hunk of brand experience as the main ingredient.

Marketers are delivering more brand interaction along with product samples, in venues ranging from store aisles to hot-air balloon festivals to office buildings. Brand managers are looking for an intangible return – brand equity – on the $1.23 billion PROMO estimates they’ll spend on sampling this year. But it’s more than brand awareness (which is unquestionably crucial, especially for a product launch) that’s been added to the schedule; it’s a longer interaction that brings a brand’s personality face to face with consumers.

Take ice cream. This summer, three brands went on the road for sampling tours – same strategy, but very different flavors.

Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, purchased by Unilever in April, brought a cone-shaped hot-air balloon across the country and laid out “Urban Pastures” complete with lounge chairs, music, and free scoops in 13 cities including Boston, Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles. At the same time, Dreyer’s/Edy’s Grand descended on New York City in a cloud-spattered van to launch Dreamery super-premium, and tiny upstart Jeremy’s Microbatch sent “Secret Service” teams (in non-camouflage, orange T-shirts) to pass out tastes of Cinnamon Bun, Purple Passion Pills (looks like Viagra, tastes like mint chocolate), and Vanilla Cream Stout in 15 East Coast cities. Each brand projects a fun image – it’s ice cream, after all – but with its own personality: laid-back Ben & Jerry’s, upscale Dreamery, limited-edition MicroBatch.

Taking Their Licks Ben & Jerry’s Stop & Taste the Ice Cream Tour gave away more than one million scoops at its Urban Pasture events, held during lunch time in high-traffic business districts, and via “work stoppage” guerrilla sampling maneuvers at office buildings. The 90-foot hot-air balloon appeared at the pasture events, which included balloon festivals in Portland and Long Island.

The “pastures” were decked out with a main stage that hosted Scooper Bowl celebrity scooping matches – Winner gets a donation to the charity of his choice – and music from primarily local bands. There was a lounge area outfitted with sling-back chairs, a postcard tent (with free postage), a scrapbook tent (compiling Ben & Jerry’s moments on the tour and elsewhere), scattered games, cow manikins, and banners. Each pasture was up for only one day, but teams stayed in each city a week or two for spot sampling via cow-bedecked buses. Deutsch, Inc., New York City, handled the tour.

A road trip journal at benjerrys.com posts notes from sampling crews on the road. A Stop, Taste & Win! sweeps at the site gives a month-long lease on an RV, spending cash, and a year’s supply of ice cream. One hundred first-place “On the Road” kits include a T-shirt, cap, travel mug, and five coupons for pints. The company estimates it reached 1.5 million to two million people over the summer, double its goal. By Aug. 1, it had already given away more than one million samples, accompanied by coupons. By June 18, 52-week supermarket sales were $206 million, with ice cream-only sales up 1.2 percent and frozen yogurt down 11 percent, per Information Resources, Inc.

The tour’s timing was important for the brand, which is famous for its quirky flavors and independent founders, because it came just after its sale to giant Unilever. Co-founders Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield were upbeat about the buyout, which brings Unilever’s deep pockets to Ben & Jerry’s “social mission” and funky marketing. Ben & Jerry’s operates separately from Unilever’s other U.S. ice cream businesses – which include Good Humor and Breyer’s – and has its own board of directors.

Dreyer’s took on its first-ever sampling push to launch Dreamery. The brand hit New York in July and August, dishing up 150,000-plus samples from a touring vehicle painted like Dreamery’s artistic pints. Sampling crews in cool T-shirts and fisherman hats gave tastes and brochures headlined “Open Wide,” with descriptions of 18 flavors and a 50-cent coupon. Dreyer’s staked out high-traffic spots in the financial district and affluent neighborhoods, but backed off tourist areas like Madison Square Garden and Rockefeller Center when it realized “it was mass sampling, not quality sampling,” says Kara Haskell, associate marketing manager on Dreamery. “Our goal was not mass sampling, because not everyone can afford a $3 pint of ice cream.”

Still, “people rushed the truck to get more,” Haskell says, and asked where they could buy pints – and the samplers’ T-shirts, which were adorned with an illustration of the Manhattan skyline. (The answer for the latter was nowhere, at least yet.)

Dreyer’s also piggybacked media buys and sampled audiences of The View for a month (with plans to later hit The Late Show with David Letterman crowd) and cross-promoted with Radio Disney and Fox Radio affiliates to reach moms. The Zipatoni Co., St. Louis, handles Dreamery promotions; Marketing Werks, Chicago, handles mobile sampling.

The program may expand to several markets next summer. Dreamery’s supermarket sales hit $56 million for the 52 weeks ended June 18, according to IRI.

Jeremy’s MicroBatch, meanwhile, sent bright-orange “MBVs” (MicroBatch Vehicles, for you civilians) on a $3 million sampling blitz through 15 East Coast markets this spring and summer. Gung-ho “Secret Service” samplers banter with passers-by while dipping up 200,000 four-ounce samples, as well as coupons and T-shirts anyplace from street corners to concerts.

The Philadelphia-based company plays up its “hot commodity-ness” of small batches and limited-time flavors (the lineup changes twice a year) and targets adults 18 to 30, with emphasis on the under-25 crowd. When they’re working a big crowd, samplers give out only a few T-shirts to keep the brand’s cachet. “The message is, once you get your paws on a pint or T-shirt, savor it,” says spokesperson Michelle Peranteau.

MicoBatch introduces a four-ounce package in October as it pursues distribution in theaters, bookstores, and c-stores – venues young adults visit more often than the grocery store. In July, Coca-Cola veteran Joe Casey signed on as chief operating officer – joining new president-ceo Joe Phillips, former senior vp of sales at athletic-apparel maker Champion – to expand distribution beyond its current 5,000 stores.

Your Store, My Story Other brands bring a strong image in-store. Starbucks was already in supermarkets in five regions when Kraft signed a distribution deal in 1998. As it expanded throughout `99, Kraft wanted grocery shoppers to taste Starbucks literally and figuratively: It wanted to replicate the ambiance of a Starbucks coffee shop – the polar opposite of the average grocery store.

“We wanted to capture the authenticity of Starbucks,” says Tracy Roe Haffner, category business director-specialty coffees at Kraft. “To sell the brand in grocery stores, we had to be sure the high quality and emotional experience would translate. We put a lot of investment into the sampling environment.”

Kraft created a portable “booth,” with two vinyl screens mounted like window shades and a wooden counter between them. The unit takes less than 10 seconds to set up. Retailers liked the innovative display, and often give it prime space in perimeter departments.

To train samplers (who dressed like the Starbucks baristas), Kraft agency J. Brown/LMC Group of Stamford, CT, sent a half-dozen of its own staffers to Starbucks U, the three-day training program for the coffee chain’s employees. J. Brown staffers then gave samplers in-person instructions, including the brewing recipe and tips on Starbucks’ cultural flavor.

“Starbucks invests so heavily in training their baristas, the last thing we wanted to do was grocery-store sampling where our baristas didn’t live up to that,” Haffner says.

Kraft, which distributes Starbucks as broadly as flagship brand Maxwell House, also chose stores carefully. It started with the geographic and demographic database of Market Reach, a division of J. Brown, to target stores by Zip Code. Then it indexed neighborhoods by coffee consumption and average household income. Once Kraft zeroed in on stores, it sent key shoppers a letter (with a high-value coupon) from the store.

Same-day sales have been double Kraft’s average performance for in-store sampling programs. The company has sampled more than 4,000 stores since the program began in mid-`99, and continues off-site sampling via four upscale “baristamobiles” that open out into mini-cafes. That effort, handled by GMR Marketing, New Berlin, WI, continues through 2001. (Starbucks’ sales in food, drug, and mass outlets hit $92 million for the 52 weeks ended June 18, per IRI.)

For some brands, the trick is to find the right face – or faces – for sampling. When Malt-O-Meal planned Bet You Can’t Tell the Difference side-by-side sampling for its bagged cereal (tastes as good as national brands, but costs less) in 1998, it needed identical twins. Malt-O-Meal and its agency, Minneapolis-based WatersMolitor, approached five sampling companies, but only one would even bid the job. Sales & Marketing Group, Irvine, CA, hunted down about 220 sets of identical twins 18 and older who lived near each other and still look alike (same hairstyle, same clothes). Then S&MG worked backwards, starting with the twins’ locales rather than the grocers’, and executing a very small sell-in window to accommodate the twins’ schedules, since most worked full-time jobs or had other promotional gigs “more lucrative than working in a grocery store,” says Kim Giangregorio, S&MG executive vp-client solutions.

Then came some “very expensive training,” she says. S&MG staffers flew into the top 10 markets to meet one-on-one with twins and winnow out those who weren’t outgoing enough. “We were loathe to whittle away any of them, but in a supermarket you only have 10 seconds to make an impact on consumers,” Giangregorio says. “We preferred to work with them and try to draw them out.”

S&MG ended up with 179 sets of twin samplers. The agency used Stamford, CT-based Trade Dimensions’ TDLinx data to pinpoint stores with high cereal volume near twins’ homes, which let them tell retailers they were chosen for the campaign. Retailers had to buy a pallet of Malt-O-Meal bagged cereal – a lot for a second-tier brand. But many liked the twin concept so well they bought in and gave samplers prime front-of-store space. Sampling ran only four hours, rather than the standard six to eight. Incremental volume skyrocketed 800 percent. “This was really a crystallized event because the [samplers] and stores were selected very carefully,” Giangregorio says.

Piggyback With Big Mac Sometimes, brand sampling taps a partner’s atmosphere and audience. Tiger Electronics hitched its biggest promotion ever – this fall’s launch of HitClips micro music players – to McDonald’s Summer Music Event last month. October tie-ins with Oscar Mayer Lunchables and Fox Kids Network will give more HitClips away as prizes.

Tiger got kids and teens to sample HitClips at $5 a pop in 11,000 McDonald’s restaurants. With any food purchase, McD customers could buy a Clip – picture a mini-CD player complete with lapel pin and earplug – and a one-song Music Clip of either Britney Spears or NSYNC. (McD also offered three CD samplers with Spears, NSYNC, and others, as well as a backstage video, for $5 each with purchase.) HitClips roll into toy stores this month, selling for around $8 with one clip. Single Clips, about the size of a postage stamp, sell for $4 to $5. The Rockin’ Micro Boombox goes for $10, and the HitClips Alarm Clock (which plays six clips) is $15.

“There’s been no retailer backlash, even though this was very big as a promotion first,” says Tiger spokes-man Marc Rosenberg. “Like razors and blades, we have to get the players out there first.”

Ironically, the clips themselves are 60-second samples of songs, not full-length singles. “It’s the meat, not the entire song,” Rosenberg says. “We don’t want to bite into singles sales.”

Tiger approached McDonald’s in February when the Hasbro division heard Big Mac was planning a music promotion. A planned 30-minute meeting at Toy Fair turned into three hours, and “the planets aligned,” Rosenberg says. McD agency Simon Marketing’s Oak Brook, IL, office worked with Tiger to execute. Tiger, best known for Furby (which spawned another McDonald’s collaboration), expects to sell millions of players and clips this year.

Later, an October-through-January Rock Your Block! sweepstakes with Oscar Mayer puts gamepieces on 50 million Lunchables Fun Packs and Mega Packs. Grand prize is an in-school concert with Dream Street, an Atlantic Records artist featured on HitClips. Five thousand first-prize packages include a HitClips Downloader (which records up to three minutes of sound from computers), a HitClips player, a Boombox, an Alarm Clock, and six Clips.

The Fox Kids Get Hip with HitClips promo runs Oct. 2-14 with an on-air sweeps giving away tickets and backstage passes to a concert with a HitClips artist. Second prize (250 of them) is the full product lineup; third prize (1,000) is a HitClip player.

Such branding events, of course, raise the bar for sampling in general. Marketers who do their homework to target the right crowd, and bring the right hosts to the party, leave consumers with a good taste in their mouths.

Health and fitness clubs can add muscle to a sampling regimen.

Health and fitness clubs offer their members a place to get in shape and stay that way. But they’re also unique venues for marketers to reach an attractive, targeted – and buff – demographic.

While most of the nearly 14,000 clubs in the U.S. are local “mom-and-pop” operations, there are a few large national chains including Bally’s Total Fitness of Chicago and 24 Hour Fitness, Pleasanton, CA. Gold’s Gym, Richmond, VA, owns and operates a handful of fitness centers, although the majority of clubs carrying that name are franchises.

The International Health, Racquet and Sportsclub Assocation (IHRSA) is a Boston-based organization formed in 1981 to collectively represent clubs and establish guidelines for business and operating practices. IHRSA currently counts about 3,500 U.S. clubs within its membership, with that total representing 40 percent of the total U.S. membership, or 8.75 million individuals.

Chuck Leve, director of business development for IHRSA, sees member clubs as ideal places for certain types of consumer promotions, especially sampling programs. Among the many consumer product companies that have run programs through IHRSA are Pepsi-Cola, Dr. Scholl’s, L’Oreal, New Balance, and Clif Bar. “We look for relationships with manufacturers whose products are central to the health club experience,” says Leve.

This summer, Pepsi is working with IHRSA on an effort that will be featured on individual bottles of the Purchase, NY-based beverage maker’s Aquafina water, All-Sport sports drink, and Fruit Works, a recent launch into the juice category. Club members who purchase those brands, which are sold in on-premise vending machines and reach-in coolers, will look for stickers announcing that they’ve won a prize from the club such as a T-shirt, a free massage, or a free week of membership.

Clubs sign on individually for the program, which is relatively labor intensive in terms of applying the stickers. Sometimes local bottlers assist in the effort, or the clubs’ staff will handle the chore. (Pepsi has in the past included health clubs among locations for national under-the-cap contests.)

IHRSA locations offer manufacturers access to a qualified group of health-conscious consumers, says Leve – although he does recognize the limitations. For example, although gyms cater to distinct groups of members at different parts of the day – moms in the mornings, teens after school, businessmen after work – they’re not yet set up for marketers to take advantage of such segmentation.

“We’re not great retailers, but our clubs are excellent outlets for sampling, because we provide a unique slice of demography,” says Leve. “Our membership is 55 percent female, and they have attractive education and income levels. But beyond that, they share a lifestyle. They read labels on food products and do other things that make them a good target. In the personal care area, the majority of exercisers are going to shower immediately after a workout, so for certain items such as hair products, soaps, deodorants, and razors, there’s an opportunity for immediate trial.”

On the other hand, clubs have to be careful not to offend members by bombarding them with too many uninvited solicitations after they’re already spent good money to join the club. “The first filter is that any promotion has to provide value for the club. If not, we can’t do the program,” Leve explains. That eliminates areas such as financial services, cell phones, or phonecards. “Unless it’s free, there’s no value-added component. If it’s using the members just because of their demographic profile, it’s a negative for the club.”

In May, New York City-based Gruner + Jahr USA Publishing’s Child magazine distributed sample bags to IHRSA clubs in 20 U.S. markets. The bags contained childcare products and coupons from advertisers including Gerber, Dove, 3M Nexcare, and Viactiv. The program called for 10,000 bags to be distributed to moms through club nurseries and daycare centers.

“One of the nice things about doing promotions with fitness centers is that the emphasis is on the mother,” says Child associate publisher-marketing Pam Millman. “The aegis of the program was getting advertisers interested in reaching the mother instead of the child. Regardless of whether or not the women are working, at fitness centers we know they are trying to carve out time for themselves.”

Millman plans to run another similar sampling program with IHRSA, although this time the magazine will try to enlist beauty care advertisers – again reflecting the desire to move beyond ads directed to childcare. “When you’re a vertical publication, it’s easy to get business that’s indigenous to your audience,” she says. But in looking to grow Child’s advertising base, “we hope that fitness centers will be part of that growth.”

IHRSA is looking toward upcoming sampling programs with Abbott Laboratories for personal care products and General Mills for a new breakfast cereal.

The Mills already has the Breakfast of Champions. Why not the Breakfast of Weekend Warriors, too?