O ur Super Bowl ROI [from advertising in the game] did exactly what we intended. Our retailers loved it, and we grew February sales — it was our biggest month [last] year and awareness went up five points.
When you look at [Super Bowl advertising], it’s a huge investment and we could probably get more continuity. What I’m looking for now is something with more continuity to match consumption habits. We want to create demand all year long.
We’re at the intersection of these two massive American trends when it comes to food: less sugar and more protein. The Greek yogurt category just exploded, from like 1 percent to 53 percent of the $8 billion refrigerated yogurt market, so everyone’s a competitor now. Newman’s Own just entered; everyone’s got a private-label Greek yogurt.
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Photo by: MARTIN CROOK / CHOBANI
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There’s like eight guns pointed right at us, and everyone’s got something like our product; there’s a lot of “greekwashing.”
In the last eight months, there’s been 800 new Greek yogurt SKUs on the shelves. It’s just congested.
There were more yogurt commercials on the last Super Bowl than snack food commercials, so maybe the world has gone mad.
The Olympics have been a great association for us. Athletes love the product, and it’s a great connection.
The college deal [across 17 IMG College schools, eventually increasing to 27] gets us into local retailers who want that college market.
We’ll look for any sports connection with a high degree of credibility and authenticity.
Yogurt is at 37 percent household penetration. When that gets up over 50 percent, maybe everyone will have sports tie-ins, like we have with the Olympics and colleges.
All of our sponsorships have to have a sampling/trial piece to it or it’s of no use to us. For now, we’re still focused on growing the category.
I’ve done beer marketing wars, telecom wars, and credit card wars. They were usually product against product with one or two high-end or economy extensions. In the yogurt market … it’s a multifront war. When I was working on the MasterCard account, it was us against Visa, a one-front war. Now it’s a mosaic.
The average American consumes 13 pounds of yogurt a year. In Europe, especially Western Europe, that figure is close to 40 pounds a year. They eat it all day. So a lot of what we need to do is get consumers here used to eating yogurt in different dayparts.
People think our sales ratio of women to men is an 80/20 skew, but it’s more like 55/45. Men like protein. Breakfast is still our predominant daypart at retail, so we’re looking to segment further by eating occasion.
An ideal company has the discipline of the big guys and the entrepreneurship and creativity of the small guys. That’s what we’re trying to create.
The caution here is that you can’t innovate your way out of a core decline, so while we’ve innovated, we’ve defended the core business and are innovating like crazy to get new customers. It’s a bit of a high-wire act.
When you still need awareness — and we’re less than 10 years old, so we do — we’re still spending a lot on traditional media. Will we still do a lot of social? Of course, but I can’t grow $300 million a year on social.
We’ve still got only 35 percent brand awareness, so social for us is in addition to, not in lieu of. The fastest way for us to grow awareness and get yogurt in more households is through big stuff like sports and mass television advertising.
There are lots of brands borrowing equity for causes that don’t make sense for their products. We’ve given back since our first cup, but that’s microscopic on our packaging, because I don’t want to guilt people.
Buy our product because it is well-made and tastes delicious. Buy it secondarily because we give a bunch of money to charity and we stick up for animal rights.
I worked at McCann Worldgroup and saw it could work as highest common denominator. Now I work with multiple agencies and they’re good, but I can see both sides, because it is just hard to manage four agencies.
Given the right structure and the right agency, I would tell you that having one might be easier. You can get great work from either model, but you don’t want to be herding cats if you can avoid it.
