Marketers naturally expect their agencies to create big ideas for promotion campaigns. But they often wimp out when it comes to creating sales-force collateral materials to sell the promo to retailers, and end up directing their agencies to cramthe selling information into an 8-by-11-inch sheet that doesn’t begin to do justice to the big idea.
Not so at Vlasic Foods International. These marketers wanted a brochure as big and innovative as the landmark product they were introducing. They wanted to wow retailers to sell them on stocking and displaying the product in a big way. The new item hitting grocery shelves this spring is Vlasic’s Hamburger Stackers – the world’s biggest pickle.
Made from a special cucumber that’s approximately 3.5 inches in diameter, each Hamburger Stackers pickle slice is large enough to cover an entire burger. Americans eat an average of 13 hamburgers at home each year; one out of every six burgers is eaten with a pickle.
Like the pickle, the brochure created by Flair Communications is big in every way. The folded piece measures 9.5-by-15.5 inches. The cover has a beauty shot of a hamburger with three old-fashioned, little pickles on it. Pull a tab and an iris-dissolve mechanism transforms the shot into a burger covered by one giant Stackers pickle. At the same time, a voice chip activates, so retailers can hear the famous Vlasic stork (think Groucho Marx) declare: “Now here’s a pickle that’s got everything covered. In fact, it covers an entire hamboiger! If it were any bigger, it would have its own ZIP code!”
The brochure opens to a giant three-dimensional pop-up of the Hamburger Stackers jar, with giant pickles “exploding” out of it. Was the brochure expensive to produce? Sure. But the investment was worth it to demonstrate Vlasic’s support for its new product to the trade as well as to the consumer. The sell-in was phenomenal, with retailers calling Vlassic to find out how to get their hands on the product.
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