With the pending death of traditional online advertising, what’s an advertiser to do?
Well, one solution is to create smart branded utilities. Capitalizing on the iPhone wave sweeping the Western world, Kraft, or one of their smarter agencies, have cleverly created one of the most functional mobile branded utilities to date, the iFood Assistant. The application is packed with over 7000 of Kraft’s recipes.
Now, followers of Kraft’s marketing story will know that Kraft has been one of the latent players in the digital game. However, over the years, they have stubbornly stuck to their traditional belief that the only value add they can give consumers online is recipes. As any food fan will tell you however, the Internet is swamped with free recipes. So it’s hardly a value adding strategy or even differentiator in the crowded online space.
In the mobile world however, recipes barely exists, unless you have some painfully slow GPRS access to Orange World perhaps (though that’s just a guess really).
By porting their recipes into the mobile medium, especially one as sexy as the iPhone, they have created a piece of branded utility that now only makes a lot of sense for the brand, but a very attractive utility for the consumer. As an amateur gourmet cook myself, I can tell you what a pain in the neck it is to find a template recipe to create a new dish from. Searching for the right recipe on Google is tedious at best. And using books results in the same boring dishes. Mobile access to 7000 recipes gives you near endless variety. More importantly, it gives you them where you need it, at the grocers while you hunt for ingredients!
But this great convenience is not why I am writing about the iFood Assistant. As a piece of marketing, it’s a great case study. First, Kraft sells this application via the iTunes application store for $0.99. According to an Apple iPhone for the enterprise case study, Kraft claims a seven-figure download for their little application. At a buck a pop, that’s a million bucks. Now I can tell you it didn’t cost them a million to make this application and place some promotions and PR on the web. So what you have is a nice little piece of successful new web marketing that not only gets and keeps the consumer’s interest, but also turns a tidy little profit for the marketing department.
And this is the future of marketing really. No longer should marketing be considered a cost-centered. In the coming years, CEO’s are going to start asking Marketing Directors to tell them what kind of profit returns they can expect from their departments, rather than just asking for brand sales projections.
For more information:
http://www.kraftfoods.com/kf/iFood.aspx
http://www.apple.com/iphone/enterprise/kraft-foods.html
