Have you ever attempted to mash-up social media & your brand by providing your customer an opportunity to ‘customise’ the brand to be in sync with a social conversation? More so if your brand happens to be a cookie!
This is what Oreo, arguably world’s most loved brand of cookie, attempted to do when it introduced the ‘Oreo Trending Vending Lounge’ where it sought to use propriety 3D printers to build customised & delicious cookies in real time, based on which flavour was trending on Tw
itter! - Refer to the video below!
For this, Oreo set up a ‘Trending Vending’ machine which had a translucent touch screen, were trending flavours under various hashtag were visible -
#chanceofrain;
#overboard.
Customers had the option of selecting, making & tasting cookies in real time based on which flavour was trending at that time. Or they could create a suitable cookie to match their mood at that very moment by choosing from various cream, flavours, colours, patterns options which were available to them – the machine offered over 16000+ possible cookie variations!
Business lesson for us:
1. Offer your customers an opportunity to engage with your brand to ‘personalise’ it to suit their taste & mood.
2. Effort Justification: A brand, which a customer creates, will be more valuable to them. Embed this principle of Behavioural Science into your business model & permit your customer to customise / personalise the brand to suit them. They will value your brand more.
3. Attempt to integrate Social media into your Customer Plan.
4. Embed technology to achieve these seemingly ‘oxymoronic’ objectives. This would involve embedding 3D printers into your manufacturing / distribution system.
5. Develop distribution models which encourage your customers to engage with the brands so that they can personalise the brand it to suit their mood & their own unique requirement.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iev2TrcRP-s
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In this series, Rajesh Srivastava, Business Strategist and Visiting Faculty at IIM Indore gives you a regular dose of strategy case studies to help you think and keep you one step ahead as a professional as compared to your peers. Rajesh is an alumnus of IIM Bangalore and IIT Kanpur and has over 2 decades of experience in the FMCG industry. All previous
Strategy with RS posts can be found here
