The Company They Keep
CO-PROMOTIONS FEATURING COMPATIBLE BRANDS can hop up an offer like cayenne on a mud bug. Through joint efforts, brands may deliver a doubly compelling message while reducing costs. With a partner, a brand can proffer a deal that is highly relevant to its consumer audience. (Fuji figured out that phonecards make sense to film and camera buyers, since users of both products are likely to be travelers.)
Co-promos can have the impact of an on-pack premium offer, but without requiring the brand to inventory or fulfill anything. Recently, the nation’s publishers were tickled pink to provide Coke with the snippets it needed for an in-pack offer of popular book excerpts breaking next month.
Brands are forging tandem offers with produce in retailers’ perishables departments, and with toy and clothing chains. The cross-town alliances are allowing them to secure new distribution channels for their offers with co-marketing partners.
“Packaged goods companies don’t just want to give added value. They want to offer something that is really appealing to their target customers,” says Lisa Schuster, category director at Cooptions, Darien, CT.
These offers are taking on some surprising dimensions. General Mills partnered with a major retailer on the introduction of its Cinnamon Grahams cereal, but it wasn’t a supermarket chain. Boxes of the new cereal featured coupons for Old Navy Stores, and the stores sampled the cereal.
Meanwhile, non-food companies are banging on grocers’ doors to get at their young-family customers. Microsoft offered values on 28 of its software titles on Kellogg cereal boxes in supermarket aisles last year.
Bel/Kaukauna’s Laughing Cow Cheez- Bits of Tarrytown, NY, found a partner in Kay-Bee Stores. CheezBits boxes for a back-to-school promo last year offered $2 off any Crayola purchase at Kay-Bee. Grocery shoppers took a proof along with an in-pack coupon to the toy store, which honored the discount. CheezBits provided its target audience – moms with six- to 12-year-olds – with a fun, quality product offer that fit in with the season. Kay-Bee attracted shoppers who might otherwise do all their back-to-school shopping at Wal-Mart or Kmart.
There are some unlikely bedfellows getting together on-pack and in-pack. Here’s a rundown on some of the day’s notable co-promotions.
Have a Book and a Smile When Marilyn Allen, senior vp and executive director of marketing at HarperCollins, heard what the folks at Diet Coke planned she was “overjoyed.”
Allen felt she had a great-but-underpublicized author in Lisa Scottoline, a writer of legal suspense stories in the mode of John Grisham with five novels to her name, including the new Mistaken Identity, set to be released in March. Scottoline had even taken to running her own ads, inviting readers in one to help edit her online.
Such is marketing in the world of book publishing. Print advertising, author tours, and bookstore P-O-P is about the extent of it.
Then Diet Coke went looking for partners for its The Story Begins with Diet Coke national promo, which begins Feb. 1. It invited publishers to place excerpts from their new releases in Diet Coke and Caffeine-Free Diet Coke 12- and 24-packs.
More than 40 million packages will carry literary samplings from six publishers including Doubleday, Delacorte Press, and Penguin Putnam. Titles include Elmore Leonard’s Be Cool and Barbara Taylor Bradford’s Sudden Change of Heart, in addition to Mistaken Identity.
“We’ve never done anything of this scale,” says Allen. HarperCollins has produced 3-by-3-inch, 33-page excerpts to fit inside the cardboard packs.
“I always felt if I could mass-sample Scottoline I could convert a lot of readers,” Allen adds.
The Diet Coke packs will carry four-color stencil pictures of the books featured inside so consumers can collect all six.
Diet Coke’s Story program is a reaction to research that showed a strong affinity between Diet Coke drinkers and reading. The majority of them consume seven or more books a year along with their favorite soft drink, and about 30 percent of book club members are Diet Coke drinkers.
The nine-week promotion will be supported nationally with in-store merchandising in supermarkets, drug stores, and mass merchants.
Perishable the Thought Look at any study about consumers’ favorite promotional vehicles and you’ll find that they love IRCs, or instantly redeemable coupons for the uninitiated. HBC brands especially know that a peel-off coupon that consumers can detach and cash in immediately at the register are quite effective in moving product. The number of coupons distributed on-pack – the vast majority of those being IRCs – has grown from 650 million in 1996 to 1.1 billion in 1998, says Affinity Marketing president Jim Dowd, whose Richmond, VA-based company puts together coupon cross-promotions.
Now marketers are attempting a twist on the standard IRC formula: They’re placing coupons on complementary products, with cents-off values offered upon purchas e of the promoting brand. Very often, these promotions involve perishable items found elsewhere in the supermarket.
Instead of a tag on a steak advertising 50 cents off Acme steak sauce, the coupon provides 50 cents off the steak with the purchase of the sauce. The coupon is coded so it validates with the purchase of the sauce.
From the consumers’ perspective, the offer is stronger because it lays a high value on a perishable or dairy case product they intended to buy anyway. The approach helps retailers add value to perishables that can’t be price-pared any further.
Retailers often respond by building adjacent displays of the brand to help the deal go down, says Dowd.
B&M baked beans offered 30 cents off ground beef with the purchase of a can of beans. In another offer, consumers got 40 cents off steak by buying Accent.
IRCs can support the meal solution trend when underlaminants (labels that remain on the pack after the IRC is peeled off) are used that can carry recipes or helpful hints to be taken home with the high-traffic products.
Fuji Peels Out Arthur Frommer would be impressed: Fuji made a match in travelers’ heaven when it teamed its film and instant cameras with phonecards.
“People who are buying film are usually going somewhere, often on vacation. We thought phonecards created great synergy,” says Brian Hammock, consumer film brand manager at Fuji Photo Film USA, Elmsford, NY.
Fuji Photo shrink-wrapped phonecards to 35mm film multi-packs and single-use cameras, securing retail displays and fast-winding sales at various accounts around the country.
In most of its accounts, the film manufacturer ran one of two designs on 10-minute cards from PromoTel, wrapping values onto its 100, 200, and 400 speed film in three-plus-one packs. Call-out stickers indicated the free on-pack offers.
Leveraging its status as the official film of Major League Soccer, Fuji in some markets put professional teams’ logos on cards. Other cards featured pictures of the Fuji blimp.
“We usually see a two- to three-time increase in our volume when we have secondary displays carrying the promotions,” says Hammock.
Fuji’s second largest retail account after Wal-Mart – Meijer Stores of Grand Rapids, MI – offered phonecards with peel-off coupons carrying various manufacturers’ offers.
The cards featured coupon peel-off technology manufactured and distributed by the Kolins Group, West Bloomfield, MI. Kolins creates laminated cards with the touch and feel of phonecards, onto which coupons can be fixed, says president Roger Kolins.
By carrying values in addition to the free phone time, the cards incent shoppers to return to the stores to redeem the peel-off coupons. In Meijer’s promo, the offers included $1 off Duracell batteries and $1 off photo processing.
Kolins tapped PhoneCard Express, Hollywood, FL, to provide the cards because the company has the required customer service capability to 1/2eld calls from rotary phones, which are prevalent in Meijer’s markets.
Shrink-wrapped onto single-use cameras and multi-packs in the Peel-A-Deal phonecard promo, the cards offered 10 minutes of phone time, and a $500 peel and win prize, along with five peel-off coupons.
The offer doubled the 120-store chain’s Christmas sales of film and cameras.
Meijer’s had much less success when it bought 50,000 more Peel-A-Deal cards for a promotion with Kodak, in which it asked customers buying photo processing to collect coupon certificates and turn them in for a coupon-laden phone card.
Too much work. Consumers relate to cards when they are offered on-pack as an immediate value.
The In-Pack that Didn’t In its Christmas Spin Disc promotion, Secaucus, NJ-based Aiwa Electronics enlisted 25 partners ranging from Best Western to Braun Electric Shavers to Flowers USA to help it sell stereo systems. Griffin Marketing and Promotion, Minneapolis, developed an enhanced CD-ROM that contained a software program featuring the partners’ coupon offers, a BMW Z3 sweepstakes, demos of electronic games from Activision, and Internet-access software from AT&T.
Some brands’ coupons could be printed out, others required consumers to call a phone number. The CD could be taken out of the computer and put into a stereo, where the user could hear six songs from Warner Brothers Records’ artists.
Bearing about $1,000 worth of coupon values, Spin Disc was supposed to be a gift with purchase, packed with Aiwa stereo systems. But Aiwa failed to get the discs into the packages in time for the fall promotion. Griffen was called upon to develop tear pads and easels inviting shoppers to enter the BMW sweepstakes. Customers had to send in a proof of purchase to get the Spin Disc.
“Aiwa was not able to execute the promotion as planned. They were left sitting with 300,000 Spin Discs,” says someone who was involved with the promo.
Aiwa’s partners probably will not be getting the response they hoped for. “You need to have a much better offer if you are asking customers to send away for the gift,” says a brand manager who took part in the promo. “You are reducing the odds of somebody actually responding.”
