Just like you’re not supposed to have a favorite child, you’re definitely not supposed to have a favorite client.
But if that client brought the world’s most amazing cookie dough – made for eating, not baking – into your life then that would have to be your favorite client, right?
They’ve been terrific to work with since day one and we were thrilled to produce the Cookie Dough Cafe Tasting Tour over the course of this summer. It’s been worth the extra few pounds.
Here’s some background on the marketing challenge.
THE SITUATION
Cookie Dough Café created the “edible cookie dough” category when they launched back in 2012. Their 2014 appearance on Shark Tank brought national recognition, helping to propel the brand to national distribution in more than 10,000 grocery stores.
Unfortunately, Cookie Dough Cafe’s success has attracted some major food manufacturers to enter the booming category. As a result, some key retailers were pressuring the brand to give them extra support on a local level.
We were given the challenge of how to best drive local sales to those retail customers.
INSIGHT
Our data showed that TASTE was the #1 purchase driver for the category by far. Consumers try it and they buy it. It’s a pretty simple formula.
We simply needed to get their core consumer (women 18-34) to taste their incredible products, and to do so within close proximity of their most important retailers.
SOLUTION
We launched the Cookie Dough Café Tasting Tour, inviting shoppers to try and buy the brand in key retail support markets in and around their most important retailers. A whimsically designed food truck brought the brand to life at grassroots events and retail locations throughout the summer.
My favorite little detail of the tour was almost an afterthought. We wanted to create an “Instagrammable Moment” for the tour but didn’t have any room in the budget to do so. So we created a gigantic spoon – the brand’s icon – that we made available to guests who wanted to pose for pictures with it.
It turns out that people LOVE having their picture taken with a gigantic spoon. Who knew?
RESULTS
We commissioned an independent analytics report to measure the impact of the Tasting Tour. And although the details are confidential we saw tremendous lifts (mid double digits) in purchase intent, with an overall ROI of more than 8 to 1!
And by segmenting the data we learned exactly what aspects of the tour boosted our ROI vs. those that missed the mark. We uncovered some incredible data that will help optimize the Tour in 2020.
Thanks so much to Cookie Dough Cafe for a terrific collaboration this year. We look forward to replicating our success next year!
