Everybody stand for Danette ! A major example of partnership between a company (Danone) and its customers.
For many years, we’ve been trying to find the best way to install a warm and respectful relationship between a company and its customers but there is a way to do that and it’s important to respect each step of it, in order to attend the final objective, you fixed yourself.
“it’s important to retain your audience and to put your customers at the centre of your interest”
First of all, it’s important to retain your audience and to put your customers at the centre of your interest, they have to feel concerned about the products you’re selling and of course they don’t want to be considered only as money creators but as participants in the business strategy of your company and what is a better way to do that than putting them inside the choice of the product range by a marketing campaign.
Danone, the famous French food and beverage group perfectly understood that and in 2006 when they launched a completely new kind of campaign never seen before in France. They made their customer vote for which Danette (their dessert cream brand created in 1970) flavour they would like to find in stores on the following year. This strategy was everything but a coincidence, in fact Danette has been trying to launch several new versions of his cream pot in the past but most of them appeared on the market to be considered as commercial flops, like the “Danette light” or the “Danette mousse”. Finally, after few commercial failures, Danette had the idea to create a marketing campaign that was named “La Danette des français”.
The customer was able to be a part of the new flavours choice process in 2006 by voting with a simple process: a small piece of paper was pasted on the packaging and you just had to sent it back to the company by mail to vote. Since the 2010’s you just have to click on the Danette website or like, share or retweet on social medias like Facebook, Twitter or Instagram to vote for your best choice.
The first year this campaign was made, more than 400,000 people voted on the Danette website in less than a month for their favourite flavour of the year between “Crème Brûlée”, “Madeleine” and “Praliné”. And the winner appeared to be Crème brûlée with 48% of votes.
“now it’s more than 2 million people that are voting each year for the flavour of the year”
Ten years after the launching of this campaign this marketing operation is still going and now it’s more than 2 million people that are voting each year for the flavour of the year. Also Danette has decided to evolve in consequence in order to erase a repetition effect for the customer that could be bored to use the same system every year. So in 2010 for the 40 years’ anniversary of Danette, the brand decided to call a famous French chef and they made him collaborate with the customers to create the new flavour of the year.
This process has been used during 4 years with different cooking chef like Christophe Michalak or Norbert Tarayre (which was known by the TV show Top Chef in 2012) and happened to be a huge commercial success. After 2013, Danette changed again the campaign and now customers have to vote for the Danette of their region, which gave all the French people the opportunity to discover new flavours when they’re travelling in France. But you also can find and taste a Danette made with your typical regional products which is the best advertisement for your region.
“by making customers choose which flavours are going to be the next ones on shelves, they have a 100% probability that the flavour will be a success.”
To my point, this strategy is a great example of how the customer can help a company to innovate and to propose new concepts. Danette wants to seduce the customers with this kind of operations and by making customers choose which flavours are going to be the next ones on shelves, they have a 100% probability that the flavour will be a success. It has been proved in 2007 when the Danette of the year elected was white chocolate because now this flavour is a best seller of the brand. To provide the tiredness of the customer with “trend flavours” Danette is changing them on the product range every 3 years and they only keep the best sellers that are vanilla, caramel, chocolate and now white chocolate.
“Danette Facebook page has more fans than Danone Facebook page”
Finally, this campaign reinforced the loyalty of customers with the brand because the number of fans on Facebook is now reaching more than 1,5 million people (one of the biggest score of the food and beverage market in France) and the funniest part is that the Danette Facebook page has more fans than Danone Facebook page. We can now ask ourselves what is going to be the next thing that Danette is reserving to its French customers in the close future but with Euro 2016 and Olympic Games this summer on the line, we can be sure that they will find new great marketing ideas.
Wandrille Boniface