The campaign involved using this inconspicuous and familiar little bit of branding turf for a visual experiment: instead of the familiar logo, the stickers carried bold and whimsical iconish face imagery — a monkey, a happy Cyclops, a vaguely anime-style girl, a luchador and so on. Using the same colors as the familiar Chiquita logo, the designs were genuine eye-catchers.

And they may have caught even more eyes online than they did in the store: Chiquita set up a Web tool for people to whip up their own sticker drag-and-drop mixes, and an obliging public created more than 25,000 of them in less than five months, according to the company. This enthusiasm has led to a competition — 1,355 entries were submitted over several months, and online voting starts tomorrow at eatachiquita.com to pick 18 designs that will be stuck onto actual bananas.

By actually contributing to the defamiliarizing of something familiar, the contestants layer new “intrigue” onto one company’s supply of what is, after all, a pure commodity.

It’s an amazing campaign of community and letting go of the control of your brand to bring emotion to it. Or as Chiquita reps put it, the campaign is “designed to re-engage that emotional connection with consumers.” So many brands try to this, but with little success. The attempts are usually fairly meaningless, because adding your words to a coffee cup isn’t nearly as interesting as genuinely engaging, re-working and re-imagining an iconic brand to include your ideas, not your ideas of what you think the brand will like. Way to go, Chiquita.

Retailers are continuing to expand their private label products while pushing brand label products off the shelves. Where retailers were once content with building their brand in basic CPG categories, they have continued to expand their reach.

Most recently, Kroger has more than doubled the number of items in its Mirra line of private-label cosmetics, shampoos and other beauty products, and plans to add more, reports Dan Sewell. The grocery chain is making store brands a priority, and already offers more than 20,000 store brand items, up 25 percent from two years ago.

“CEO David B. Dillon said Kroger identified health and beauty as an underdeveloped area among store brands,” Sewell reports. Kroger points to the success of Whole Foods cosmetics as a reason to plant a foot into the beauty category.

Certainly, it will be interesting to see how CPG manufacturers respond to the expansion of private label into previously undisturbed categories. Will they go online? Sell direct? Appeal to customer loyalty?

Consumers are swayed by branding and labeling, according to a new report published in the Journal of Food Quality and Preference. Heavily swayed, in fact.

Labels and brands exert more influence on consumers than price. “Overall, label styles enticed consumer attention on-shelf, according to the study, followed by brand recognition and finally, flavor/taste perception.”

“Younger consumers were said to use multiple factors in their purchase decisions, including product packaging and price; while older consumers were found to be more brand-loyal overall, despite price comparisons.”

Brands that are looking to make the shift online will want to ensure that all the money they’ve spent on their brand and label for the store shelf isn’t wasted once it’s product hits the virtual shelves of shopping.

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.

Photo via New York Times.

Big-box stores have finally joined the loyalty game. Sam’s Club is offering personalized discounts for buyers through it’s eValues program that tailors bargains based on a member’s buying history. The New York Times reports:

Linda Vytlacil, vice president for member insights and innovation at Sam’s Club, said coupons normally had a response rate of 1 percent or 2 percent. With eValues, she said, as many as 20 percent to 30 percent of eligible customers collect the discount they are offered.

The program is available only to Sam’s Club’s “Plus” members, who pay a higher yearly membership fee than do regular members. They can view the deals by e-mail, on the Sam’s Club Web site or at store kiosks.

“There’s no clipping coupons,” Ms. Vytlacil said, adding that eValues offered “highly individual relevant offers specific to each Plus member. All they have to do is purchase the product, and the savings are automatically applied at checkout.” Like other membership clubs, shoppers must present a card at checkout.

While consumers and retailers benefit from such long-awaited programs, manufacturers continue to watch from afar. Watch for CPG manufacturers to create their own loyalty programs to buid brand loyalty and acquire customer data. This is just the beginning for an exciting chapter on loyalty in CPG.

Several media outlets recently received a bar of soap from Diapers.com parent company Quidsi, inviting reporters to a launch party for their next project, Soap.com.

The card reads that it will be “one of the biggest retail launches in history,” promising “a fresh approach to ecommerce,” and that they are “raising the bar in online shopping.”

As more brands turn online to expand their reach, it’s no surprise that Diapers.com is trying to expand their reach beyond their existing market. How the company implements such big promises will surely be a launch to watch.

This is shaping up to be a huge issue for CPG, and the rise of retailer private label goods means it is likely to get worse as retailers clear out more real estate for their own growing product lines. It appears to be a symptom of the increasingly dysfunctional relationship between CPG manufacturers and their retail channels.

Question: How will CPG manufacturers respond?

One potential option for manufacturers facing reduced distribution through traditional retail is to expand their online direct sales efforts. This is a major trend in non-CPG markets. For example, Internet Retailer recently announced that manufacturers selling direct to consumer is the fastest growing online retail category in its Top 500 Guide. Will CPG manufacturers follow this trend? It seems to be one viable means to gain some control over their distribution to consumers.  Are there other options available?  With billions of dollars at stake, this will be interesting to watch.