Launching a new brand can be difficult, especially for an already well-known product and company. McCormick has long been in the recipe and food industry (they’ll be celebrating their 125th next year), but they understand the need to innovate when it comes to distinguishing their products from one another.
In order to launch their new McCormick Gourmet brand, they created the McCormick Dinner Party Chain contest and #GoGourmet campaign to reach out to their younger target audience. At SocialMedia.org’s BlogWell conference, McCormick’s senior manager of digital marketing and social media, Jennifer LaFrance, discussed how the company solved their brand’s identity crisis and used their fan’s content and interests to fuel their campaign.
A few big points from Jennifer’s presentation:
- Listen to your audience first: McCormick monitored their target audience for over a year to completely understand who they were speaking to. They discovered their target audience’s interests and passions, outside of gourmet food, to integrate into their Dinner Party campaign.
- Learn from your fans: Unlike most recipe websites, McCormick allowed fans to create their own content for recipes and dinner party themes for their contesting campaign. Although McCormick did offer default recipe and theme options, they let their fan-generated content drive their innovation channel and inspire more fans to join the contest.
- Do one thing right, and then move on to the next one: McCormick Gourmet currently doesn’t have a Twitter account, but they’re not worried about it. They’re focusing on doing well on their more visual social platforms first before branching out into other channels.
Watch Jennifer’s presentation below. The slides are available for download.
If you like this presentation, see more great social media case studies like it live at SocialMedia.org’s BlogWell conference Oct. 22 in Boston.