Editor’s Note: Insights That Work is a showcase of how the GRIT Top 50 Most Innovative Suppliers create solutions to some of the biggest challenges in insights today. This year’s edition provides case studies on brands like Nestle, Shell, Frito-Lay, and more.
Challenge
How do you create a more authentic advertising campaign for one of America’s most iconic brands, especially at a time when consumers are becoming more skeptical about being marketed to? Frito-Lay North America, known for its innovative marketing, decided to involve consumers in a new “Anti-Ad” campaign for Doritos that doesn’t feature the brand name, logo, product or actual packaging. Instead, these new messages capitalize on the strong associations that consumers have with the product shape, flavoring, packaging colors and brand style.
But there is a huge potential risk in spending marketing dollars to promote a message that doesn’t feature your brand. Prior to launching this risky campaign, Frito-Lay North America turned to 1Q to get a quick assessment of whether or not consumers would be able to identify with the “unbranded” campaign and to verify that the campaign would have the positive impact they intended.
Solution
1Q’s self-service platform allowed Frito-Lay the opportunity to get instantaneous results to verify the strength of the campaign by targeting their core consumers. After guaranteeing that respondents viewed the intended commercial, they were asked a series of open-end and closed-end questions surrounding the brand featured, the overall appeal of the ad and the respondent’s likes/dislikes about the content. Understanding if the consumers were able to identify the brand featured in the commercial, given the fact that it was “nameless”, was important to the team.
Outcome
1Q’s technology allowed Frito-Lay to go from programming to viewing results in minutes—not days or weeks—on their interactive dashboard. The team was also able to dive in deeper and garner additional insights by having access to the raw data.
The Frito-Lay team was impressed by how quickly the 1Q platform was able to produce quality results. “We had results within 30 minutes of launching this survey,” said Brodie Dunn, Director of Strategic Insights at Frito-Lay North America. After the commercial launched, the in-market results confirmed the 1Q learning.
Given 1Q’s self-service dashboard, targeting options, and lightning-fast results, the Frito-Lay team was able to balance speed, cost, and quality. This allowed the team to conduct research that once required weeks or months to complete and the expense of a full-service research provider.