CLIENT Jamba Juice
TITLE "New Product Launch"
Deliverables
In-store marketing included posters, window displays, cash register POP, stanchions, menu-board posters, A-frames, employee buttons, and cup talkers which were placed atop each smoothie ordered. Online marketing included creating MySpace pages for each functional smoothie personality.
Target
Jamba’s light users, or current customers who visit Jamba Juice two or fewer times per month.
Challenge & Assignment
Jamba Juice hired Swirl to help solve a classic marketing problem: if research shows that most consumers know and love Jamba Juice, then why aren’t more consumers visiting a Jamba Juice store more often?
In the second quarter of 2007, Jamba Inc. reported that "system comparable sales were negative" despite a store-count increase. Can Swirl encourage current Jamba Juice customers to buy more smoothies per month, thereby increasing system comparable sales?
Strategy & Solution
First we started with real consumers. We observed them, and we spoke with them.
Jamba Juice consumers told us they are always on-the-go, juggling work and home, while trying to live healthier lives each day. When we asked why they like Jamba Juice so much, most said a trip to Jamba was like giving themselves "a treat". And when we asked why they didn’t visit Jamba Juice more often, most hesitated before saying, "I just didn’t think about it."
From this research, our marketing objective was clear. How do we reposition Jamba Juice from an "infrequent treat" to something more essential to everyday life?
Next we studied the product.
And we learned that Jamba Juice had been developing a new line of smoothie products which contained healthful ingredients or "boosts". For instance, one product was called Coldbuster because it could help prevent the onset of a cold. Another was named Heart Defender to promote heart health. And yet another smoothie contained the Acai berry from Brazil, a super-fruit known for its concentrated antioxidant power to fight free radicals and help your circulation.
When we learned about these new products, we knew we had discovered part of our solution. These new (more functional) smoothies tasted unbelievably great, but they were more than "treats" - if marketed properly, consumers would see them as essential to living healthier every day. And living healthier each day is something Jamba customers said they were already striving to do. So just like a vitamin, a Jamba a day could keep the doctor away (and maybe help keep system comparable sales rising at the same time).
Swirl partnered with the client team at Jamba Juice to develop all-new in-store POS materials promoting these essential Jamba products to current Jamba customers. These in-store materials featured an entirely new Jamba Juice brand look-and-feel which was integrated into wall posters, window posters, menu-board advertising, cash-register advertising, and a new kind of promotional device called a "cup talker": a paper disk that would slip over the straw that rises up and out of the smoothie cup; this "cup talker" would serve as our most "personal" POS device and be impossible for a consumer to miss, promoting the new products and incenting trial, right under the consumer’s nose.
Once each store was dressed floor-to-ceiling in this fresh brand look-and-feel, no customer could walk into a Jamba Juice store without feeling the visual excitement around these new functional products, and the renewed vitality of the Jamba Juice brand.
But what about outside the store? How could we keep Jamba Juice top-of-mind with consumers who are always on-the-go, and not used to thinking about Jamba Juice every day?
As we developed our integrated marketing strategy, we studied the everyday lives of these on-the-go Jamba Juice customers and observed how they consume media from the moment they wake in the morning, commute to work, stay at work, and then come home at night.
To reach these Jamba consumers when they are on-the-move, we recommended a powerful combination of radio: DJ traffic reads during rush hour (reminding consumers to stop into Jamba Juice today, but allowing each DJ to add a bit of color, personalizing the message, if not almost endorsing the new products). Plus strategic flights of educational and entertaining 60-second radio commercials, each spot introducing the consumer to one new functional smoothie (the first product promoted was the Acai Super-Antioxidant Smoothie, a product personified with a suave Brazilian accent).
To reach Jamba consumers when they are held captive at work during the day, we proposed online marketing not only to educate consumers further about these new healthful products, but also to remind them to stop at Jamba Juice on a break during the day or on their way home from work.
We even created a profile page in Myspace for each new smoothie personality, so that online consumers could engage with each functional flavor, interact, and get to know them. Swirl continues to communicate online with friends of each product character every day.
Results
Not only did system comparable sales stop their decline, they increased significantly (we are not allowed to tell you how much). But just let us say: the future looks bright for our friends at Jamba Juice.
