I’m writing this in response to Dan Neufeld’s blog post about Heinz’s decision to produce a line of coloured ketchup. In his blog post, he highlighted reasons as to why this product line failed to succeed in the long run. I agree with all the reasons he posted, as well as the points highlighted by the blog he [Dan] wrote the post on, which is from Fastcompany. Dan covered the points as to why this product did not succeed. These points being that the marketing done by Heinz targeted the wrong audience, Heinz overestimated the life span of the product, and Heinz changed something that was already fundamentally attributed to its product; ketchup is red.
To supplement Dan’s post, I’ll be talking about two specific product that involve odd colours that did succeed, and I’ll be giving one fundamental reason as to why I think they did.
Taken from GTS Static
Taken from Mouse Planet
Doritos 3D: Monster Colorz – changes the colour of your tongue to blue as oppose to the normal orange [cheese]
Dark Vador Burger – burgers on a pair of dyed black buns
I believe that these two products succeeded, because of the fact that their producers recognized the products’ purpose. They recognized that these are NOVELTY products. Meaning, the main purpose of these products were to drive up interest in the main products, normal Doritos and normal burgers from Quick. They were both released for a limited time, in limited quantities, and they were tied up with blockbuster hits. They both stirred up their own buzzes, the Dark Vador burger was featured in multiple blogs and even in CNN, while Doritos 3D was well promoted by Frito-Lays.
The bottom line is that, branding and positioning are important. Important enough to the point where it can be argued that making the wrong decisions on either of these aspects guarantee product failure. The producers of these products did not try and push the product line [abrupt repositioning] like Heinz did, because they knew that the product life of these novelties were short and interest in them would most certainly die down. They were basically edible marketing campaigns, and they served their purpose.
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