25 Trendsetters to Watch

As we round the turn into the new year, the editors of Chief Marketer thought we'd stop to compile an educated but fairly personal list of the trends and tactics we expect to see driving marketing in 2012, and an equally informal list of the brands at the forefront of those efforts. These aren't the only new initiatives around, nor are the 25 brands named here the only practitioners. In many cases, they're just executing particularly well on strategies that many are pursuing. But we expect them all to make for interesting watching in the months ahead — especially by their competitors.

Speaking Straight to Shoppers:

Once, CPG companies had only a handful of ways to message to customers: mass media, instore campaigns and free-standing inserts with coupons and special offers. The companies controlled the media buys; in the other channels, they often had to work in tandem with retail partners.

Not anymore. Thanks to new media, and particularly the mobile and social channels, CPG brands can now make direct connections both with their longtime loyalist customers and, increasingly, with new customers in store aisles.

KRAFT FOODS (1.) has been in the vanguard of this outreach. Individual Kraft brands have made news with record-setting numbers of Facebook likes (Oreo), Twitter campaigns (Kraft Mac & Cheese) and recipe ebooks (Philadelphia Cream Cheese). But it's the company's broad cross-brand efforts to find fans and drive sales that are most compelling, and hardest for competing brand parents to copy.

Those initiatives are embodied in Kraft iFood Assistant, the smartphone shopping app that launched in December 2008 for the iPhone as a paid app (99 cents), and last September rolled out as version 3.0. The original allowed users to access Kraft's inhouse recipe content, build shopping lists on the phone, and locate stores and occasional offers. That earned it a spot in an iPhone commercial, rankings as one of the most useful smartphone apps of the year, and the #2 download spot among iTunes Store lifestyle apps. By some reckonings, 60% of those who have downloaded the app are still using it regularly.

The new iPhone app soups up that functionality by letting users share recipes on Facebook, scan barcodes in their pantries to build shopping lists, and link mobile coupons to their grocery loyalty cards in a third-party partnership with Coupons.com. Those coupons can be for non-Kraft products (although nothing that competes with a Kraft brand).

At launch, the app's aim was to make Kraft more relevant at the grocery point of purchase, says Ed Kaczmarek, director of innovation, consumer experiences at Kraft Foods. “We wanted to make meal prep, planning and shopping easier and a bit more fun, and provide daily inspiration that pulls from the years Kraft has been developing recipes,” he adds.

It's never been about the ads. “The utility was always more important than the branding, and the consumer experience was where we spent the most time,” Kaczmarek says. Nevertheless, he says, Kraft got some early complaints from users who felt they'd spent 99 cents to buy Kraft ads. To counterbalance the fee, Kraft now offers iFood-specific coupons not available in any other channel.

The coming reorganization of Kraft has added some uncertainty, but for now Kaczmarek's function is unique in a CPG company. He and his team members control an independent budget, so they can not only strategize pilot campaigns with brand managers, but support those trials with dollars.

“When I go to get our brands involved in our innovation initiatives, while I need their time and their belief, I'm funding the effort,” he says. “That helps get more traction than if I was asking each of them to use their own money.”

Last year Kraft also took the lead among CPD brands in rolling out an iPad app. “Big Fork, Little Fork” targets parents with recipes, lots of video and interactive games for teaching kids about healthy foods. Kaczmarek says Kraft is also testing Internet-linked ads on Google TV, allowing viewers to click through spots to relevant product videos and other content.

Earlier this year, Kraft partnered with Intel on a demo instore kiosk that can take shopping-list and loyalty-card info from users' iFood apps and suggest meals for that night's dinner based on past purchases. Even more, it can use a camera to scan the user for gender and age and tailor those suggestions to the detected demographic — about as close to the customer as a brand can get instore.

“We're now working on iFood Assistant 4.0,” Kaczmarek says. “I can't give details, but look for some big innovations to come.”