[Marketing] [IAEP] Sugar Cereal?

[Sean DALY]

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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