Gold - Juniper Park
Juniper Park plants Lay’s in familiar ground
The challenge
At several billion dollars in sales, Lay’s is an icon of American culture and a household staple. But as consumers turned to healthier options, Frito-Lay needed a way to restore confidence among the sales force and reignite retail partners’ enthusiasm for the brand.
The Lay’s team bypassed their retail marketing partner and asked Juniper Park to build a customer activation program that took the "close to home" movement farther than it had ever gone before, with a localized retail program.
The agency set out to re-engage sales forces and retailers at the ultimate moment of consumer truth – the point of purchase – but not in the typical chain-customized mode. Frito-lay’s North American AOR developed a retail campaign building on its consumer-facing marketing program “Happiness is Simple,” which established that Lay’s, made with just three ingredients, are, like all the best things in life, simple – and did so with regional customizations.
The insight
As a huge brand, it’s easy to forget that Lay’s potatoes are locally grown on farms across America: its potatoes are sourced from over 80 farms in 27 states, many of which have been growing potatoes for Lay’s for generations. The chips are also locally manufactured in 21 states. And research confirmed that people have strong beliefs that if something comes from the land, it has inherently good qualities.
As the recession exploded, people were also looking to support American businesses, especially those close to home. Lay’s local story could turn Frito-Lay from a faceless corporate image into a brand with simple, honest values that resided within American communities.
The B!G idea
Rather than customize the program by retailer, the local story allowed for in-store activation that was tailored to individual markets, to ignite the pride of local sales forces and retailers.
While the “Locally Grown” program theme was consistent, each message was as local as possible. In Tennessee, messaging talked about potatoes from Tennessee, and in California, about potatoes from California. In total Juniper Park created 38 different versions and over 300 pieces of POS material for the sales force, ranging from freestanding displays to cart-talkers to shelf blades.
The impact
This customer activation program saw the biggest up-take of display materials in Frito-Lay’s history, with customized messaging deployed at every major grocery account across America [numbers were provided]. And most importantly, dollar sales of Lay’s are up significantly to date in 2009 [numbers were provided].
The power of a great story is that others will want to share it as well. Within eight weeks, Lay’s earned over 76 million impressions from journalists and bloggers alike.
