Lay’s Do Us A Flavor Pushes Consumer Engagement Beyond Point of No Return
The votes have been tallied. A victor has been chosen. The winner of the Lay’s Do Us A Flavor contest for 2015 is…Southern Biscuits and Gravy! After receiving millions of submissions from consumers all over the U.S. and logging millions more votes on Facebook for the four finalists, Lay’s has its newest flavor and with an established fan following to boot.
That process certainly sounds much better than the traditional, out-dated approach of trend watching, focus groups and taste testing. Lay’s has leveraged the crowd in the simplest yet most effective way to source new flavors but letting Millenials in on the sausage making could lead to questions about more than just flavors.
Want to know what consumers want? Just ask, and offer prizes
Lay’s Do Us A Flavor began outside the U.S., first gaining popularity in the United Kingdom with classic flavors like Scottish Haggis and ironically American Cheeseburger. The concept is simple. Any consumer can submit a flavor suggestion. A group of brand representatives and foodies choose 10 top flavors. Frito-Lay food scientists mock up sample chips and 3-4 finalists are chosen. Consumers then get to vote on the finalists to choose a winner. The person who submitted the winning entry gets $1 million or 1% of sales from the first year, whichever is higher.
The concept is so simple that you can’t help but ask, “Why hasn’t anyone else done this before?” Well, they have. Sam Adams and Arizona Iced Tea have both asked consumers to join the conversation on their next flavors, but neither company has accompanied their promotions with the same social media might of Lay’s.
Do Us A Flavor launched in the U.S. in 2013 with celebrity endorsers Iron Chef Michael Symon and actress Eva Longoria. Entertainer and restauranteur Nick Lachey took center stage for this year’s contest, going as far as greeting finalists at their doorstep to tell them they had won. The Lay’s Facebook page is teeming with Do Us A Flavorcontent for the almost 7 million people that have liked the page. To date, this promotion has stretched across 14 countries and collected more than 25 million submissions.
We can safely say this has been a success, so far. Lay’s Do Us A Flavor could be setting a dangerous precedent of consumer engagement that might soon reach too far for comfort.
Invite Millenials inside and they may never move out
Do Us A Flavor launched in the U.S. to reengage Millenials, who had effectively forgotten about Lay’s. Frito-Lay Chief Marketing Officer and architect of Do Us A Flavor Ram Krishnan told Ad Age “Consumers have gone from being passive to active, highly engaged consumers. These are like venture capitalist consumers. They actually want to spend their time giving feedback on the products.”
Venture capitalist consumers sound challenging enough but what if they one day become activist investor consumers? Perhaps having a say on the next Lay’s flavor won’t be enough and consumers will demand a steep reduction in sodium. Or only responsibilty grown potatos. Or vegan chips with no preservatives. This might sound far-fetched, but we’ve already seen examples of consumer activism forcing large companies to change course.
Take a look at Nike. Well before Facebook and Twitter gave all consumers a digital megaphone to make their voices heard, Nike came under fire for labor malpractice in their factories. The 1990’s global boycott of Nike forced the company to clean up its supply chain. No doubt this case of consumer activism led to positive outcomes for society but it also cost Nike a ton.
Apparel may seem unrelated, so let’s look at a PepsiCo customer: Walmart. Relentless pressure from consumers surely had some impact on its recent decision to raise wages. Again, another positive result but one that likely contributed to reducing earnings forecasts and its stock plunging.
If PepsiCo customer isn’t good enough, then look inside PepsiCo at Gatorade. In 2013, a 15-year old named Sarah Kavanagh successfully launched a war against Gatorade over the use of brominated vegetable oil (BVO). She started a petition on Change.org and quickly found herself on morning talk shows pushing her cause. To be clear, the actual research on BVO is inconclusive at best, and PepsiCo’s products were in line with FDA regulations. Even still, PepsiCo had to take action to remove the ingredient all together because one outspoken teen decided to speak out.
Consumer packaged goods companies walk a fine line every day. They must delight consumers to get close to their hearts. At the same time, firms must keep consumers at arm’s length to maintain control. Campaigns like Do Us A Flavor fundamentally rewrite the contract between companies and consumers. The consequences of that new contract have yet to be determined. When Ad Age asked Krishnan about the drawbacks of having such a close relationship with consumers, Krishnan replied “Sometimes you don’t like their feedback”. If the past is any indication, not liking consumer feedback might be least of their worries.
This was an interesting post. However, I view the crowd engagement in a more positive light. My sense is that this movement holds both sides accountable. It keeps companies honest and challenges consumers to provide constructive solutions instead of only complaining. As a CPG company, I would much rather channel consumers’ feedback towards solving problems instead of creating them, which is where crowdsourcing comes in. In the long run, crowdsourcing builds communities (like Prodigy and Elance) around a product/service, which helps to elevate brand value. I am not a potato chip person, but the hype and innovation around the Do Us A Flavor competition grabbed my attention for a product that I typically ignore. Perhaps as crowdsourcing becomes more common, it won’t be as enticing, but I think it works for now.
I agree that Lay’s did a wonderful job engaging consumers, especially millennial consumers through this campaign and more specifically with the social media efforts associated with this campaign. That said, I’m very interested to see if this increased consumer engagement actually translates to sales. I just commented on a similar crowdsourcing product post on Budweiser Black Crown, and despite involving customers in deciding the company’s next flavor, the actual product hasn’t performed as well as hoped. While it’s still early days for these new flavors, I’d be curious to see how they perform…
Great post!
I think that the Do Us a Flavor campaign was a really unique and innovative way to both gain customer feedback and build loyalty behind a particular product. Just as “DIGIT Girl” above mentioned though, I would be curious to see how these crowdsourced products perform in terms of sales relative to existing products. Is there truly a benefit to crowdsourcing product innovation in the CPG space?
Sometimes I feel getting customer feedback may not always be the best thing. An example I would hark back to is with the New Coke, which was preferred in taste tests by over 200,000 customers over both old Coke and Pepsi. Sometimes customers may not be the best judges of what they actually want. What customers say they want and what they actually will buy can be two separate things. Though not a perfectly applicable quote as it has to do with technological innovation, I find Henry Ford’s famous quote to be quite interesting: “If I had asked my customers what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse”.