Drake's Gets The (Baked) Goods on the Competition:

The so-called Northeast Corridor represents almost half of the nation's baked goods business, a market worth $540 million in 2004. After being acquired by BordenÕs, DrakeÕs Bakeries had the deep pockets that enabled the company to make a legitimate bid for that lucrative market.

Its competition? None, other than Continental Bakeries, purveyor of the Hostess brand, makers of Twinkies and Chocolate Cupcakes (with the surprise inside). Not inconsequentially, also vying for the same piece of the pie (pun intended) was Sunshine Bakers and dozens of mom-and-pop brands.

In the Northeast Corridor, key to success was the Big Apple, New York City; and as the song says, "If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere." Drake agreed, and hired Needham, Harper Steers, where I was then working as an Associate Creative Director. To capture that very tough--and expensive--market. Several of the firm's creative teams were put on the project.

The Way the Cookie Crumbles

By scanning Drake's zip code indexed sales data, we were able to quantify what Drake's salesforce had been saying but that other creative teams had ignored: New York's "uptown" demographic was primarily Hispanic, Blacks, and Dominicans, which indexed at four times the DMA norm, with two-thirds of the business concentrated in one-third of the area Upper Manhatten, the Bronx, Brooklyn and Queens.

If Drake's could dominate the uptown snack market, it would own the New York City DMA in sales volume. Selling by segment enables the use of more efficient targeted media, and precludes the cost--and waste--of more general outlets. This was not going to be easy, because in store check after store check, we had seen our consumers fork over their lunch money for the competitor's yellow "puff dogs," while our client's delicious chocolate Yodels sat untouched in their neatly stacked boxes; it was as if they were invisible.

It didn't take market research to tell us that our target market was passing up our client's product because of its ingredients or nutritional requirements--they didn't care about such things; pure and simple, it was because they didn't know anything about Drake's products; consequently, Drake's had zero share of "mind awareness" among our selected market. (At the time, Drake's advertised only on Saturday morning television, and their commercials were lost in a jungle of messages that were more important to the viewers in that time slot.)

Just showing up on the shelf is not enough to build a brand preference. Absence of information about it in the media categorizes it as a "so what" brand. In contrast, Hostess Cupcakes was Òin their faceÓ every day after school on American Bandstand, at the time the most popular television show in that time slot. Clearly, Hostess knew what Drake's was just beginning to learn. American Bandstand was the essence of selective marketing to the teen and tween (8-12 year olds) segments of the mass market. Hostess had chosen to market selectively, and as a result, had captured the market.

Using Consumers to Sell Themselves

Sounded like a job for selective marketing, which is what my team recommended to the client. Once the account group and the client "bought off" on the efficiencies and reach that could be afforded by the use of selective marketing, the next step was to sell them on our creative strategy, which was to capture the loyalty of New York's uptown kids and let them sell Drake's to their peers.

Other teams at Needham had pitched campaigns featuring everything from superheros to dancing cupcakes. My team believed that the kids in our target audience knew far better than we did what would motivate their peers to take notice of Drake's. The client agreed, and all systems were go, to test the concepts behind selective marketing, in a very competitive arena.

A Failure to Communicate Is a Failure to Sell

In the marketing profession, the definition of communication that I prefer is, Òthe art and science of moving a clear message from one point to another.Ó The art is in the method we choose to communicate; the science is the means by which we choose to employ that method. Add marketing to the mix, with its sibling terms ÒproductÓ or ÒserviceÓ and the definition becomes: The art and science of moving a clear product or service message from one point to another. Selective marketing adds the adjective Òefficiently"Óto ÒmovingÓ, Ò relevantÓ to Òclear,Ó and Òspecific"Óto Òpoint.Ó Finally, the definition of selective marketing communication is: The art and science of efficiently moving a clearly relevant product or service message from one specific point to another.

This definition fit our vision of the new Drake's campaign to a T, for we had decided to use ÒkidvertisingÓ; that is, advertising from uptown kids to uptown kids. NeedhamÕs then vice president, Larry Spector and I spent a lot of our development time learning the language and customs of the kids we were trying to influence. We called it gaining Òinsider smarts.Ó

To succeed in this endeavor, we had to put aside all our preconceived notions about our target audience, and silence any dismay we may have felt for their music, their clothing, their Òstreet talk.Ó Simply put, before we could put our selective marketing principles to work, we had to become intimately familiar with the target consumer: If music was going to play an important role in our selective marketing program, we had to learn about the music of the selected market. If it was sports, we had to find and which sport and then find out who the players were. It didn't matter if we, personally, didn't like rap, or preferred basketball to baseball, what mattered is that we become interested and knowledgeable in whatever our selected customer was interested in.

Once you establish a line of communication with your target market, keep it open. Conditions within a segment change continually, and your selective marketing efforts have to reflect those changes to remain effective. With our insider information in hand, Larry and I then worked on a basic framework and timing for 30-second television and 60-second radio spots. At the same time, working with the Needham media department and several community-based organizations, we set up a system to start generating feedback on the television habits of our targeted uptown kids.

We also began setting up casting sessions to recruit what we were calling our uptown teen creative teams. Don't even think of working in urban areas without the help and guidance of community groups and organizations.

Taking It to the Streets

Under the auspices of several grassroots social service agencies and organizations, we designed and distributed flyers by the thousands in both English and Spanish. They read, in part: Send us your Drakes commercial. You might get on TV. See Your local store for details. The retailers that carried Drake's in turn gave out a list of the community organizations processing our young hopefuls.

Those retailers that didn't carry Drake's soon began calling the bakery after the fourth or fifth kid ran across the street to a competitor. The campaign was already working! The response to the flyers was overwhelming, as was our subsequent effort to ensure that we gave every kid who came forward a fair shot. And they came in droves, along with parents, teachers, and counselors, all of whom gave us further insight into what made our targets tick.

They also helped us to see more definitely how we could best move our message out of our Third Avenue, 14th-floor Ivory Tower offices and onto the streets of New York's uptown kids. From the 934 submissions we collected, we culled them down to 30 commercially workable ideas. We then presented those 30 ideas to focus groups composed of members of our target audience; we met variously in community spaces, private homes, even on neighborhood street corners. From those groups, four ideas emerged.

Mix and Match

But by the time we got those four ideas through the system, our target market had already begun to shift its style. that's why it is so important to keep your intellegence gathering apparatus going from the minute you begin until the media is running and sales are being generated. Young people are changing faster then our process driven marketing machines can keep up. so build it to change it. Remember the target market is also a moving target.

To be effective, marketers not only have to get in touch, they have to stay in touch. When Alex Ramos came for his audition, the client and the agency agreed to bend the rules we had set for the campaign, from using only teen-generated concepts, to include a great spokesperson who could transcend the trend. Although Alex's own idea for a commercial to sell Drake's cakes and pies was not a winner, he was. His personality lit up the screen on his audition tape. Everyone who saw the tape loved him. He was handsome, dynamic, and engaging. So, we decided to keep Alex, but come up with a better idea and put them together, in what amounted to a mix-and-match strategy.

The better idea came on the final day of our open casting calls. It was a Saturday, and 15 kids, and their friends and families, showed up at the gym in PS 112 in the Bronx. The vocal category winner was a no-brainer: Nate Smith of Manhattan (who claimed to be related to singer Nancy Wilson) stood up with his group and sang, a capella, their doo-wop salute to Drake's fruit pies: Drake's fruit pies Make me feel so fly. They come in apple and cherry. Give each one a try. They brought the house down.

So we had Alex for our spokeskid to the Hispanic Kids segment and nate smith and his group for targeting our Black teens.

With the applause still ringing in our ears, the gym doors slammed open and a handful of tough-looking teens walked in. Turned out they were members of the dreaded Savage Skulls, an infamous Bronx street gang. Their leader strode onto the makeshift stage and stilled the crowd with one look. He took out a piece of paper and read a poorly written ode to Drake's Yodels. When he was finished, he looked around the room, then directly at me, and said: ÒPretty good, huh?Ó

He left as quickly as he came in, with his homeboys trailing behind him. As the gym erupted in nervous chatter, I had a brainstorm for a powerful spot: Substitute Alex Ramos for the gang leader in a commercial that reproduced the incident that had just occurred. And that's what we did, complete with Alex as Gang Leader standing in front of an auditorium full of silent kids, to whom he shouts: "Everybody Yodel!"

Director Steve Horn did a magnificent job of bringing the uptown kids' vision to the screen for Drake's. The TV, radio and transit campaign was so successful that Drake's went on to dominate the baked goods category in the Northeast. (By the way, Alex Ramos became an aeronautical engineer, his college education financed by his talent payments from the Drake's campaign.

The development of what we call insider smarts, which is essential to the success of any selective marketing program, has to start in your head. Rule number one, as we learned early in the Drake's campaign, is that you have to suspend personal tastes and value systems if you are to successfully understand those of your selected market. This can be a very difficult task when your audience and you "have nothing in common."

You may, for example, hate rap, grunge, or bluegrass, but if your selected market identifies with rap music, you had better know the difference between Tupac, Ice Cube, and Snoop. Here are some hints for breaking through:

¥ Gain some "starter" information by reading topic-relevant magazines.
¥ Consider interviewing the writers of such publications; chances are, they already have made personal contact with members of your target group.
¥ Hire writers or other "insiders" as consultants. Find out from them which products and services your selected market prefers.
¥ Identify leaders of those industries if you have to, and talk to them.
¥ Attend seminars and trade shows; they provide ideal opportunities to meet and greet. Pump attendees for their opinions on the topics you've determined are important to your market.

Finally, take to the streets. No second-hand information should ever be considered Ògood enoughÓ to a selective marketer. Don't just depend on feedback from "Street Teams." Once you have background information, go out there and get some first-hand input. And don't forget to include in this group any key "influencers" of your target audience. In the Drake's campaign, we would have been lost without the influence of our kidsÕ parents, teachers, counselors, and the community organizations.