Kraft Turns to HSN to Sell its Seasonal Recipe Booklet

The base marketing ingredient for the Kraft Cheese unit is to get into the hands of consumers ways to incorporate its products into home meals. The technical term used by Kraft is “usage.” The layman’s term is recipes. Layered on to those ideas are coupons for the highlighted products to further entice shoppers to not only buy its traditional products, like Kraft Parmesan Cheese, but also its new products like Kraft Fresh Take Cheese & Breadcrumb Mix.

As holiday marketing planning got underway several months ago in the cheese unit the strategy sessions pinpointed identifying unique ways to bundle and deliver those recipes and incentives, a marketing tactic Kraft employs year round as in-store takeaways, through email and at events, like the chili cook-off it sponsored last month.

As a starting point, a Kraft recipe booklet titled, “Make It Delicious Recipe & Coupon Booklet,” was developed featuring 20 top seasonal recipes, all of the cheese brands and 25 high-value coupons valued at $30. The recipes were cherry-picked from Kraftfoods.com and identified as the “20 top seasonal recipes,” or the highest rated recipes on the site.

“You’ll see a combination of classic recipes, as well as a handful of recipes that give consumers ways to use our new products and incentives to buy them,” Shelley Labuda, associate director, consumer activation, Kraft Cheese and Dairy Business Unit, said. “We really wanted to develop something that would be of value all year long.”

The next task was to determine a unique was to distribute the booklet, outside of the typical ways Kraft gets its recipes into consumer’s hands year round, like in-store takeaways, emails and at events.

So, with help from a partnership with HSN that was established in 2010, the booklets are for the first time being integrated into a number of HSN platforms, including television, digital and direct-to-consumer channels like email.

As an example, recipes from the booklet are prepared on-air while HSN hosts are demonstrating culinary products. The hosts let viewers know they can purchase the booklet for $4.99 through HSN.com. The coupons are valued between $1 to $1.50 with some products available free with the purchase of base brands. The booklet is also promoted through on-screen graphics and during additional culinary hours when it might not make sense to cook one of the recipes, but the purchase of the booklet is still notable.

“These graphic elements help push sales of items while other items are being demonstrated live on air,” Debbie Nelson, vice president strategic marketing alliances at HSN, said. “These passive graphic elements will also run throughout the month in culinary programming.”

In return, Kraft promotes HSN cookware on its online store, which is powered by HSN, where it also sells the booklet.

In what could be a boost for sales, discussions are underway with HSN to possibly integrate the booklets as part of a purchase “instead of just a call out,” Labuda said.

Will shoppers see the booklets in stores?

“We do feel like this lends itself well to do something in-store and depending on the response there will be more to come on that. We're doing this first to see how the booklet does overall with the program on HSN,” she said.