Digital CPG Blog

Lay’s is offering a taste of farm life with its mobile greenhouse tour, which aims to offer a peek at the “rural farm experience,” reports BrandFreak.

The campaign is an effort to spotlight real, local farmers and is an extension of the ad campaign that launched last year featuring the farmers that grow potatoes for Lay’s. Once inside the bus, visitors can meet Lay’s potato farmers and learn about the chip-making process.

“At the end of each visit (the tour includes six cities altogether), Lay’s will donate the mobile farm’s contents to nearby community gardens, to encourage the planting of fruits and vegetables in metropolitan areas. The initiative taps into the localvore craze and offers a less taxing way to get in touch with your food sources than actually visiting a farm,” BrandFreak reported.

From the photo, it looks like Lay’s is setting up shop in Target store parking lots in some areas. In New York, Lay’s rolled into Times Square and not without some dissention. “When Frito-Lay wheeled its new promotion for Lay’s potato chips — a 70-foot long, 10-foot wide traveling greenhouse — into the crowded urban chaos of Times Square today, it became the latest large food company to awkwardly attempt to exploit a food trend that has largely left them out in the cold — the local food movement,” argued Melanie Warner of BNET.

Although I suspect most locavores will see right through this effort, it’s interesting that Lay’s is making the effort to tap into this important trend.

“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.

In a great campaign dubbed “People are Talking,” Eight O’ Clock Coffee last week gave commuters in New York City a chance to win prizes like an iPad if they phone a friend about the brand, reported Media Post:

More than 13,000 cups of the coffee will be made available to travelers passing through the station, and those who phone a friend on the spot and tell them about the coffee’s great taste will have the opportunity to appear online for the venerable brand.

Seems like a great guerrilla campaign to spread the word and most of all, it’s simple and fun. Eight O’ Clock is currently running a promotion on its own site where visitors can upload a photo explaining why they love Eight O’Clock Coffee. If they’re featured on the home page, they win a free bag of coffee.

Every brand wants you to share information about their brand via social media and networks, but Emergen-C, fizzy vitamin drink mixes, ” is going one better by enabling social media fans to get or gift friends with free, mail-delivered sample packets, as well as the virtual type,” reports Media Post.

Emergen-C’s “Share the Good” campaign spans Facebook and Twitter and have somewhat of a complicated and detailed strategy:

On Twitter, the brand will, of course, be tweeting much more frequently (offering energy-boosting tips, health facts and trivia, invites to its many events, etc.). A newly created “Emergen-C Tweet Patrol” will be on the case, and in charge of some special initiatives.

One of those Twitter efforts is rewarding the “intrepid” few (about 100) who continued to follow Emergen-C despite the long dearth of tweets by offering them a free T-shirt bearing the immortal words in that one-and-only 2009 tweet (“checking out Joshua Lynn’s article http://www.purebranding.com/blog/?p=40″).

A more ambitious, ongoing initiative will have the Patrol picking a specific word that relates to the product’s benefits each week, like “tired,” then picking a random sample of those using that word in their tweets and following them. Those who choose to follow back will be tweeted a message telling them that Emergen-C would like to send them a free sample “starter kit” by mail. (To receive one, they supply their postal address via a simple digital form provided.)

Although certainly creative, I’m not sure the return will be all that high for such Twitter initiatives. More compelling is their Facebook strategy:

As for Facebook, fans will not only be able to share “virtual” Emergen-C products, but the real thing. When they log in, they’ll be informed that they can give real samples to 10 friends in need of an Emergen-C pick-me-up. So, when Facebook friends post that they’re falling asleep at work, feeling run-down, forgetful, etc., Emergen-C followers can flag those friends, triggering both a message saying that they want to send them free sample packets and a personalized video.

This sounds like a great campaign, but Emergen-C will want to make sure that they don’t make it too complicated (i.e., will Emergen-C personalize the video or will the fan have to create their own personalized video?). Emergen-C could easily duplicate their Facebook strategy on Twitter by providing a landing page on their site, or could simply use Twitter to drive people to their Facebook promotions. The major concern then becomes measuring the effectiveness of the samples.

What do you think? Is this an effective way to provide samples and use social media to spread the word about your products?