Food Companies Visit Classroom to Score Bigger Piece of Consumer Pie.

Case of Fruit

Americans keep getting busier and busier, and baking is fast becoming a lost art form. That was bad news for Rochester, NY-based Agrilink Foods, makers of the Comstock and Wilderness fruit pie filling brands.

In the summer of 1999, the manufacturer joined forces with its main competitor in the fruit filling category - Knouse Co.'s Lucky Leaf brand - in an effort to increase baking's appeal to a younger demographic. Sweetening the initiative was an educational kit for middle and high school teachers, cooked up by the Green Bay, Wisc-based Goltz Seering Agency (GSA). The goal: to get kids excited about baking, thus preventing the extinction of fruit filling as a pantry staple.

"We targeted teens with hopes of inspiring future consumers to take an interest in cooking and baking," says Janet Bonkowski, PR director at Goltz Seering. "Parents are baking less and less, so it's not a skill that's getting passed down."

In the Test Kitchen

Homework was paramount in crafting a classroom campaign that wouldn't flop with kids and teachers. After amassing a pile of secondary research about consumers' waning baking habits, the GSA team conducted a feasibility study (involving phone interviews with educators) to determine whether or not a fruit- filled curriculum would even fly. The target, in this case, was "family and consumer sciences teachers" (hint: that's "Home-Ec" to us old fogies).

"We asked teachers, 'If this kit were available, would you order it? Use it? When would you need it?" Bonkowski says. Just as they suspected, teachers were starved for good classroom content - but wary of heavily branded promotional materials.

In phase two of its research, the team amassed a focus group of half a dozen educators in the Midwest (budget and time constraints prevented the agency from tapping a more geographically diverse sample). Through this exercise, the team learned that a well-timed campaign would have to launch not during back-to- school season, but rather in January - at the time when teachers were submitting their budget requests for the following school year.

The focus group also helped fine-tune the ingredients in the classroom kit. A poster idea, for example, was eliminated from the mix as an unnecessary expense, while more dollars were allocated to top-notch video production and kid talent. Teachers also warned that graphics had to be "down with it" and video segments needed to be shortened, from the originally-slated 15 minutes each to 10 minutes or less. Also, content that smelled even remotely hokey would be tuned out by kids.

Back to School

In January 2000, Goltz Seering produced 5,000 kits - each of which included seven lesson plans, with handouts corresponding to related videotape segments. Segments such as "From the Grower to the Grocer" and "Snack Attack" (focusing on after school snacks) highlighted not only basic baking techniques and recipe ideas, but also information about how fruits are grown, harvested, transported and manufactured. (Did you know that Michigan produces 75% of all cherries used to make fruit filling?)

The lesson plan booklet also encouraged teachers to visit the sponsors' Web sites ( http://www.piefilling.com and http://www.knouse.com ) for additional recipe ideas.

Rather than mailing the kits cold, however, the agency team warmed up its act by dispatching a teaser postcard to 15,000 consumer science teachers nationwide, inviting them to order the educational kit via phone or email. "There are actually about 30,000 teachers at this course level in the country, but we could only go out to half of them, for budgetary reasons," Bonkowski says. "Names were selected randomly and chosen from about 21 states where pie filling had a strong sales presence."

Order forms for the kits also were posted on the Comstock, Wilderness and Lucky Leaf Web sites. And banner ads promoting the kits appeared in some of teachers' favorite online haunts, including David Levin's Learning@ Web sites ( http://www.ecnet/users/gdlevin/home.html ) and the Home and Family Internet Resource Guide ( http://www.homenfamily.com ).

A La Mode

Did the campaign make the grade? By December 2000, nearly 3,700 kits (roughly 74% of the print run) had been requested and distributed to teachers. Moreover, 309 teachers returned evaluation forms that had been included in the kits. Of those respondents, 86% cited the material as "excellent or very good" and 95% said they'd use the kit again. To date, the kit has been distributed and used in 42 states.

Has the campaign truly swayed kids' attitudes toward baking? Or will ovens nationwide continue to collect dust? Only time will tell.

(Bonkowski, 920/435-9800)

What's That Smell?

Any time the scent of marketing wafts close to school grounds, parents and educators start to get nervous. As such, a soft sell approach was in order. The partnership between Agrilink and Knouse proved critical, because it made the campaign more about fruit filling and baking - and not about the brand names. "We tried to be sensitive about not promoting the brands too much, because we didn't want teachers to feel like they were being used as a marketing vehicle. Instead we focused on promoting the category. The approach was similar to the way a commodities group like cattle ranchers or milk processors would collaborate," Bonkowski says.

Hard Pressed

Kids and teachers dug the fruit filling angle, but journalists did not. A release about the campaign issued to trade press reporters yielded zilch in the way of coverage (PRN not withstanding). Fortunately, the media was not a primary campaign target.

Campaign Ingredients

Budget: $250,000 ($20,900 for research;$157,825 for program materials/development; $21,700 for promotion; $5,300 for evaluation/analysis; $19,000 for shipping/fulfillment to date))

Key client contacts: David Anderson and Melissa Tillmann (Comstock/Wilderness); Lee Esser, director of marketing and trade relations (Lucky Leaf)

Key Goltz Seering staffers: AE Debbie Craemer; principal Laural Virtues; PR director Janet Bonkowski; creative director David Richards; writer/producer Marti Gillespie; senior art director Marilee Foeltanz; purchasing coordinator Tracy Sorensen.

Secret ingredient: To energize its team about fruit fillings after acquiring the Comstock account, Goltz Seering held a "cook-off" event, challenging its staffers to compete in an internal recipe contest. Clients came in to judge the "fruits of their labor."