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What are YOU talking about?

“Cheese on top”

Original article: www.imediaconnection.com/summits/coverage/20551.asp
How Kraft started spreading WOM

When the words “Breakfast from Heaven” and ‘viral campaign’ are uttered in the same sentence one could be forgiven for conjuring up images that require a bio-hazard suit. But people are uttering them, and the sentence usually ends with “success”. In what was – at the time – unchartered territory and a gamble on Kraft’s behalf, the company has embraced its share of the future of media as we see it.

Don’t worry, it starts to make more sense from here. Do you remember that TV commercial for John West Salmon? The one where the crazy John West employee fights a grizzly bear for the superb looking fish it just caught. Not only is said bear 3 times the size of the man, but it busts out with a flurry of pseudo-kungfu punches and blisteringly fast stance-changes! Hilarious. The point is, this is viral campaigning; produce a frighteningly clever video featuring your product / brand, slap it somewhere online so that your potential customers see it and forward it to all their contacts, who forward it on again and on again and… well ok, it’s not that simple after all.

Thankfully this is where just the right mix of strategy, progressive-thinking, and luck met this challenge head-on and delivered one of Kraft’s most successful marketing campaigns. The product in question: Kraft’s 1/3 less fat Philadelphia Cream Cheese. The challenge? Convince potential customers that – in spite of the reduced fat – it still tasted great! (Let’s face it, how many times have you and I been burnt buying a fat-free/reduced version of brandX only to have it taste like a sweaty sock? They said it tasted just like the real thing!!)

For a mature brand like Kraft it is all too easy to follow the exhaustively beaten path of traditional media marketing – reach and repetition – to put the message out there and hope people run with it. The company would be forgiven for doing so as it has a popular brand and solid reputation crafted through over eight decades of business. But at this, the cusp of a brave new age in which information and entertainment is delivered when you want it, where you want it, how you want it; people need to be engaged. People don’t listen to corporations anymore (if they indeed ever did), but their friends/peers? Adam Butler, senior associate brand manager at Kraft says “Who are you going to believe more?”

The plan from the beginning was to ignite a word-of-mouth campaign to raise awareness that Kraft’s 1/3 less fat Philly was still “Breakfast from Heaven”, serving it up to tired JetBlue flight travellers as a surprise after a flight. Charged with the daunting task of orchestrating a huge product launch within a two week deadline, Kraft’s Adam and Tyler leveraged the ‘blogosphere’ as the most efficient vehicle for distributing the campaign to the masses. The video clips for Kraft’s campaign weren’t riotously funny or devilishly witty; they didn’t have to be. But they had to be believable.

The video clips simply captured JetBlue passenger’s reaction to the breakfast which in itself was ideal; it was no longer Kraft – the company – telling customers 1/3 less fat Philly was delicious, but an individual, personal account of the experience; word of mouth. To add to the depth of personalisation and further develop the campaigns’ own identity, Adam and Tyler wrote a new blog for the product, including the back-story to the campaign with its tight deadline so customers could identify with individual persons, not a big company.

AdamandTyler.com talks to people quite differently to Kraft’s traditional marketing vehicles, because “personalising the brand was the only way we thought we could authentically and credibly have that conversation.” They succeeded in building word-of-mouth advertising for something people had high scepticism for. The benchmarks for their success? Kraft reports the AdamandTyler campaign as one of the most effective events they have seen in terms of PR dollar efficiency. Buzz Metrics tracked the ‘noise’ (web-generated conversations); levels comparable to peak sales periods were recorded, significantly higher than normal. “Big time” national attention from television, print, and radio rounds out the list of success indicators. Bravo Adam and Tyler.

Want More Cheese?
Top 10 Lessons Learnt:

  1. Be authentic.
  2. Accept some risk; you will not be able to control everything.
  3. If you're not talking about your product online, others are, and they're controlling the conversation.
  4. We need to be where people are getting their information and talking about food. People are on the web doing this everyday.
  5. Don't underestimate how technologically savvy your SVC is, you can reach her/him through ways you've never thought of.
  6. You need to find a way to respond to people's comments; this is not a one-way conversation.
  7. People want to feel like they're being heard; this forum is a particularly easy way to achieve this feeling.
  8. Your brand is newsworthy, and there are people out there interested in talking about it (regardless of the brand). Don't underestimate the business team's impact on people and how much they like to talk with you.
  9. Videos. People love being on camera for anything (consider the success of YouTube).
  10. If it's been done before, don't do it again, do it better.
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