[IAEP] [Marketing] Sugar Cereal?

[Walter Bender]

For what it is worth, Chuck and I have been pursuing a major cereal
company for a while about putting Sugar in every box. Stay tuned.

-walter

On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 2:02 AM, Sean DALY <sdaly.be at gmail.com> wrote:
> Cross-posting to Marketing, since this is a marketing idea :-)
>
> It's true that cereal-box promotion is the ideal platform for
> marketing to children, especially as prescriptors ("Papa, I want Sugar
> Coated Frosted Bombs instead of Extra Sugar Hyper Doobs because
> there's a scary tarantula hidden in the box.") For this reason,
> cereal-box placement usually involves a big fat payment. Of course,
> sometimes charitable messages are accepted for free. However,
> companies are very leery of any association which could impact their
> brand negatively... such as software which doesn't work.
>
> Until fairly recently, Windows XP executables were the usual choice of
> cereal-box promoters. Lately however, with the marketshare gains of
> Apple, Flash is preferred more and more. I have never seen any
> GNU/Linux software on a cereal box, not surprising due to the
> marketshare problem.
>
> What could work is finding a new bio or fairtrade retailer brand.
> Retailers are always trying to expand in the bottom of the market,
> taking share from major brands. To grow a new launch, a retailer might
> be willing to give the space away.
>
> However, there are problems with that too... distribution would be
> limited to a single retailer. And we are positioning Sugar as premium
> quality in K-6, even if not ready for widescale deployment yet;
> bottom-shelf placement might not be ideal. But I do think bio /
> fairtrade cereal would work... in particular because there won't be
> tons of added sugar, a downside to the perception of traditional
> cereals...
>
> Sean
>
>
> On Mon, Oct 5, 2009 at 5:55 AM, Benjamin M. Schwartz
> <bmschwar at fas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>> Cereal companies routinely include CDs and DVDs in their cereal boxes if
>> they think it will help them to sell more cereal.  What greater way to
>> make your cereal more popular than to add Sugar?  The bootable DVD could
>> include many Activities, including a fast version of offline wikipedia.
>>
>> I'm not sure that our live CD/DVD stack is yet polished to the point that
>> it can reasonably be distributed to millions of people, but I think we are
>> not far, given the motivation.  The trickier thing is to convince a cereal
>> distributor of the idea.
>>
>> I leave that as an exercise to the reader.
>>
>> --Ben
>>
>> P.S.  We might have to employ a different branding if "Sugar" is a
>> problematic name in this context.
>>
>>
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-- 
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org