Motivating Out of the Box

With an integrated campaign that helped consumers become their best — by becoming less — work by Brigandi and Associates for client Kellogg’s is the recipient of the 2006 PRO Award for the Top Campaign of the Year.

You’ve seen the TV spot: a woman walks into a dressing room to try on some blue jeans. She’s young-ish; not a teenager, maybe a soccer mom. With discreet camera angles, we watch her pull on the jeans, then zip them up and button the fly. Then comes the reaction shot: she checks herself out in the constricted space of the dressing room mirror with sudden awareness. The jeans fit! She looks great! And to a thrumming bass and reverberating guitar licks, she has to strut her stuff — if only for herself within the privacy of the cubicle.

This summer, thousands of dieters got to play out the same dressing room scenario thanks to a program (for which the TV ad was only the culmination) developed by Chicago-based Brigandi and Associates for Kellogg’s Special K breakfast cereal.

“This promotion was all about consumer engagement,” says Marta Cyhan, Kellogg’s VP-worldwide promotions. “We spend lots of time with women and clearly recognized that weight management is a journey…. That there are specific emotional moments when she needs the most support. We call these ‘Moments of Truth.’”

The Special K brand had successfully worked a message that helped consumers jump start their No. 1 New Year’s resolution. The Special K Challenge has been “Lose six pounds in two weeks” by replacing two meals a day with two bowls of Special K cereal and enjoy a Special K Bar for a snack.

Now, it wanted to build a relationship from that starting point.

Brigandi provided the platform for extending the relationship beyond the two weeks, establishing a year-long Special K Challenge promotion plan that positioned the brand as a lifestyle resource throughout the year. In spring, the brand asked “Are You Beach Ready?” with a beach towel and bag self-liquidating premium offer; for fall, it was “Drop a Jean Size!” with free jeans in an instant-win sweeps; finally, for winter, Special K urged consumers to lose the pounds with a free-in-mail personal training DVD.

“We identified these timeframes as key promotional spikes within which we could extend the Special K Challenge with strategically-smart value added offers designed to enhance the challenge experience…in the form of a functional weight management tool to help her along the way, or with an additional ‘reward’ for a job well done…losing weight and winning new jeans,” Cyhan says.

Resources and communication via the Internet were crucial components.

“We developed a site that truly engaged women between ‘Challenge’ periods,” says Rocio Almodovar, executive creative services director for Brigandi. “We framed it in what we call the Four Ts: Tips, Tools, Talks and Truths.” At 120 pages of rich content, the site is the largest, most robust interactive site Kellogg has ever developed for an adult brand, according to Almodovar.

Comfort zone

With a program this ambitious and multifaceted, it helps if you work with a tried-and-true team.

“We’ve been working with Brigandi on the Special K brand for over seven years now,” Cyhan says. “They get it. They know the brand and they know Kellogg’s.”

“Our process is highly collaborative,” Almodovar agrees. “The Kellogg promotion team [led by Sandy Uridge, senior director-worldwide consumer promotions] is our conduit to all brand and internal inputs. There is tremendous interaction to define direction, identify the most compelling promotion concepts and, of course, implement all with an eye to creative excellence. You know the process is going to turn up great results when there is a shared vision and no one is afraid of working hard to achieve it.”And results there were: Special K saw growth against all of its SKUs, with double-digit franchise growth for the year, exceeding targets for existing products and new launches.

The campaign drew heavy retention during Challenge periods, as 45% of new Special K users entered the brand; 43% of them went on to become heavy users of Special K. In one year, SpecialK.com consumer registration grew by 200% and continues to grow exponentially. During promotional spikes, unique visitors to SpecialK.com were 400% higher than during the same periods the previous year. Page views increased by 500%. The Free Jeans Instant Win Sweepstakes saw a whopping 88% of instant winners redeeming the Jeans Cash card.

Building on the success of the Challenge campaign, Kellogg and Brigandi have mapped out further integrated marketing across its brand portfolio for 2007.

“Integration is the key to consumer engagement. The goal of promotion is to build the brand while motivating consumer interaction,” Cyhan says. “We’re really proud of this success, and will continue to work with all of our agency partners to deliver seamless brand relationships for our consumers.”

Menu for Success

Kellogg’s integrated campaign for the Special K Challenge included the following tactical components:

Sweepstakes: instant-win participants could redeem a free pair of blue jeans when a goal size was achieved

Online: advice, tools and chat to keep dieters motivated and engaged

FSI Coupon: with seasonally relevant on-pack offers and a coupon offer that boosted multiple purchases

Retail: events in key markets and promotional P-O-P garnered in-store attention for the Challenge, which was reinforced by on-pack punch

Media: print ads in fashion and parenting magazines and newspapers, as well as heavy cycling through TV programming with large female viewership kept awareness high

Special K’s Four Ts

• Tips: Weight management and healthy living ideas gathered by enlisting Kellogg’s nutritionists and fostering relationships with reason-to-believe partners such as Shape Magazine.
• Tools: SpecialK.com interactive tools such as the Progress Journal, Online Step Tracker and BMI Calculator, customization options and consumer-driven content.
• Talks: Extremely active Bulletin Board at SpecialK. com providing consumers with more than 10 discussion forums for inspiration and success.
• Truths: Clinical testing at a leading university proved that the Challenge works, while Special K consumers were invited to share their own truths with other weight managers by submitting their success stories for the chance to be featured at SpecialK.com.

PRO awards 2006