“Taking example from other brands, Campbell Soup Co. is the latest company to use social media to introduce a new product,” reports Brand Week.

Campbell Soup is giving 1,000 samples of its new V8 V-Fusion + Tea drinks each week through September 30th in a new Facebook effort. The company also is planning blogger outreach and an ad campaign for the drinks, which contain fruit juice, vegetable juice and tea.

This level of sampling is also unprecedented and a first for Campbell. Whether or not the product succeeds will depend on whether the customers receiving those samples will then feel compelled to talk about their experience with their friends and family.

Millennials are sharing and according to a recent survey, few expect them to stop. 895 technology experts were asked whether they think Millennials’ openness will diminish with age. Two-thirds said no.

This is the first generation that is always connected. Growing up with a culture of sharing and a standard of communication created a culture that will perpetuate itself through the years. That doesn’t mean drunken photos will stay posted forever, but the children of Millennials might be annoyed by their parents’ blog about potty training (via WOMMA).

This not only means millennials will share their personal lives, but also their love of their favorite brands – and dislike of brands that fall out of favor. Gen Y will blur the lines between what is appropriate and will expect a higher level of customer service and performance from the brands and services they use.

The recession has caused a shift in the shopping approach for consumers when purchasing national or private label with 75 percent of consumers saying they are more open to trying private label store brands products than they were two years ago, according to a recent Deloitte survey.

More than 2,000 household shoppers and food preparers were polled in a joint study released by Deloitte and Harrison Group titled, “The 2010 American Pantry Study: The New Rules of the Shopping Game,” on how they have changed their grocery shopping behavior in the last two years.

Check out the chart below:

Kraft is taking two of it’s brands and booting up their prescence on social media. Oreo is making it’s Facebook prescence more global by featuring a “World Fan of the Week” that features a different Oreo customer each week, but Wheat Thins is taking it a step further by visiting Wheat Thin fans in real life that have tweeted about the brand on Twitter and posting the videos of their visit on YouTube (awesome social media integration!). See one such video below:

At the time of writing, the above video has seen 65,000 views while another video in the campaign is already up to 455,736 views. The Wheat Thins Twitter account is only at 688 followers, however. I love the integration between different platforms and bringing it back to face-to-face interactions. But since the goal of the campaign is to stimulate comments on Twitter about Wheat Thins as well as to encourage more consumers to follow the brand there, the brand could increase it’s followers by including their Twitter handle in the video or including a customized URL for viewers to visit.

Never underestimate the power of making it simple for your customers.

Here’s a quick one. Followers of the Chiquita Frozen Fruit Smoothies brand on Twitter can enter to win a backyard patio makeover. Followers of @FruitFun enter by submitting a photo of themselves with the preferred smoothie , their family or friends kicking back outside in the summer sun with their preferred smoothie at hand. The grand-prize winner will receive a $1,000 gift card to make over his or her patio, in addition to a year’s supply of smoothies.

A good reminder that CPG brands don’t need to make it complicated to engage with their customers.

A new brand of fruit and nut snack bar, “Kind,” is trying to live up to it’s name and offer a new twist on cause marketing. Stu Elliot of the New York Times reports:

Kind’s approach to doing well by doing good is a campaign carrying the theme “Do the Kind Thing,” which plans to donate, in stages, $100,000 to organizations deemed worthy of assistance.

“Do the Kind thing” asks consumers to perform acts of kindness — deliberately instead of randomly — that are tracked through Kind cards bearing code numbers. A participant in the “Kind Movement” links his or her card and code to a charitable organization or other “redeeming” cause, as the campaign’s rules describe it; performs a kind act for someone else; and then passes the card and code on to that person.

That someone can repeat the process, and so on and so on and so on — just like in that vintage Faberge shampoo “And they told two friends” commercial. Points accrue for the causes at each step of the pay-it-forward journey, and the causes with the most points receive the donations.

More information about the campaign is available at various Web sites, among them kindsnacks.com, kindmovement.com, kinded.com and the Kind Facebook page .

It’s a race for your favorite charity and word of mouth for the success of Kind’s brand. People want to spread good, but as the founder notes, Kind will have be careful to not over-commercialize the goodness of deliberate acts of kindness for the purpose of selling the brand. And the fruit and nut bars have to be really tasty and good to begin with.

Jack Neff at AdAge recently reported that the CMO of Unilever Keith Weed stated the company will increase digital investment significantly:

Mr. Weed acknowledged there’s a risk in “getting ahead of consumers,” as he describes some of Unilever’s efforts. But he likens investments in emerging media to those in upstream product development — a necessary outlay to ensure long-term growth.

Ad Age: You’ve said you’re going to double digital spending this year, which is really very ambitious. Why?

Mr. Weed: At the end of the day we are a mass marketer. Every day, 2 billion people use our products. So what dictates what we do is those consumers, and I want to be where consumers are. The truth of the matter is we’re seeing this huge migration across the world to digital. We need to be ahead of the consumer, so when the consumer arrives, we’re already there.

We’ve talked a lot this week about being where the customer is, and it looks like Unilever understands that well.

In a study by Performics and ROI Research, consumers reported that not only are brands doing a good job interacting with them on their own channels like Facebook and Twitter, but they actually wouldn’t mind more value-added interactions:

Many social networkers already actively engage:
• 40% use social sites to connect with brands and products
• 50% of Facebook users click on Facebook ads to “like” a brand
• 37% learned about a new product or service from a social networking site
• 32% have recommended a product/service/brand to friends via a social networking site
• 32% of Twitter users re-tweet content provided by a company or product

This widespread participation between social networkers and brands is attributable to companies “getting it right” when it comes to social engagement and giving users what they want. For example, a whopping 90% said that at least some of the companies and/or products they are a fan of are doing a good job providing relevant content. More than a third said most or all of them were doing a good job. So it only makes sense that social networkers reported a desire for more of the same from the companies they follow:
• 49% want more printable coupons
• 46% want more notifications of sales and special deals
• 35% want more information about new products

Companies have a lot to give, and consumers are ready with open arms.

E-Consultancy reports:

The last eighteen months have witnessed a huge shift in the way that customers seek help for their customer service queries, problems and complaints.

The continued mainstreaming of social media has been catalytic in transforming this once settled landscape from a closed one-to-one transaction to a more open and conciliatory experience characterised by empathy.

The challenge businesses face is that this questioning is taking place at the margins, on independent platforms, where their presence is neither required nor requested. Sites such as ComplaintCommunity, Cofacio, GetSatisfaction, Amplicate, Vark, Plebble, alongside their more established counterparts like Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and TripAdvisor are shifting the power of voice back in favour of customers.

A company’s ability to remain relevant given the changing needs of an increasingly vocal customer, requires companies to actually demonstrate their customer centricity, rather than treat it as a box to tick on a ‘to do’ list.

The drive towards creating a multichannel service experience is now a more complex undertaking. In this new paradigm, customers are bypassing the necessity to engage with a company altogether. Instead, they are turning to each other for help by posting questions on third party sites or simply self-helping through their own (re)search, on forums or via blogs.

Companies now need to be where their customers are, not wait for them to show up. And that now means that everyone in your company is a customer service representative from the CEO to the PR manager to the actual customer service team.

And more than ever, a CPG brand can’t control their word of mouth and are seeping out of the retail channels they have traditionally used to reach customers. CPG brands now need to create direct-to-consumer relationships, because if they don’t, consumers will keep going without them. Multi-channel customer service is a signal of a larger trend that signals a desire to be more directly connected to the brands we bring into our homes and interact with on a daily basis.

Such a relationship requires empathy, which can’t be translated through a middle-man.

As part of the launch of Axe’s new Axe Twist, the brand is kicking off a new mobile marketing campaign, marking the largest multichannel ad program in the U.S. market using a mobile 2-D barcode, reports Drugstore News:

Jagtag mobile barcodes appear in Axe Twist marketing efforts promoting exclusive content from the Axe Twist Humor Tour, presented by Funny or Die and at college campuses. To reach the Axe target demographic – guys ages 18 to 24 years old – Jagtag mobile barcodes will be featured across multiple media channels, including print inserts within nine national men’s magazines – including GQ, Maxim and Men’s Fitness – in sample packs distributed at college campuses and hand-outs, as well as signage within movie theaters and at Six Flags theme parks nationwide.

This far-reaching campaign has a lot of implications for the future, particularly for loyalty marketers who can use mobile in myriad of ways. It would be awesome,  for instance, if Axe included the mobile barcode on their own packaging so consumers buying the product can be rewarded with exclusive content and other rewards for being a customer.