Chiquita Brands International has spent the last couple of months running an innovative promotional campaign in the US aimed at stepping up awareness of the group's bananas and giving its brand a modern twist.
Backed by a dedicated website as well as a new television advertisement, the Eat A Chiquita initiative invites consumers to design their own version of the famous blue label while also conveying the qualities of Chiquita bananas compared with other 'bad bananas'.
What sets the campaign from other recent attempts to revitalise the highly commoditised fresh banana category is the fact that Chiquita and San Francisco-based design agency Neff Ink have made efforts to make consumers – and in particular younger consumers – an integral, active part of the promotional event.
Incorporating modern graphics more akin to those found in skateboard parks than in fresh produce aisles, the campaign was clearly aimed at generating a buzz around the brand via social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter and viral video charts.
The campaign's fully immersive microsite contains viral videos, a sticker generator and a completely unique 3D flash game called Banana Boogie Battle.
According to Neff Ink's art director DJ Neff, bringing Chiquita's blue label into the 21st century was the primary objective. 'Our goal was to hopefully move the brand a couple notches closer to cool, and I think we did just that,' he says.
'Chiquita Banana has been a classic brand, a picture perfect banana with its little blue sticker,' he continues. 'I was fortunate to be able to help create a campaign for the brand that gave it a refreshing jump into the fun category.'
Much of that 'fun' element has been introduced by creating a comprehensive brand experience, complete with microsite, games and design tools that offer banana lovers an opportunity to enjoy playing with the brand itself.
'The face of the campaign was literally faces on the little stickers, from clowns to luchadors, these stickers were giving people yet another reason to love Chiquita,' says DJ Neff.
In addition, the agency came up with a series of television advertisements bearing the tagline 'Don't Let Another Good Banana Go Bad'.
The advertisements light-heartedly underline the importance of selecting a quality banana and, with the intention of making consumers laugh, were evidently designed with the viral video scene in mind.
Speaking to design industry news website design:related, DJ Neff said Chiquita had offered his company what he originally felt was the 'dream brief', that of making bananas cool.
However, it remained something of a challenge to identify precisely what it was about Chiquita bananas that would continue to appeal to young consumers in years to come.
'Determining what was cool fell into a few different areas: creativity, expression, and entertainment,' he explains.
Partnering with LA-based designers The Famous Group, Neff Ink was able to realise a website which not only provided consumers with a wealth of entertainment and information, but also enabled them to log in via their Facebook accounts.
This was deemed to be crucial in terms of spreading the campaign message as far and wide as possible and bringing traffic to the eatachiquita.com microsite.
'We created a range of ideas that we felt kept true to the Chiquita brand equities and allowed consumers to interact with the brand in new cool and exciting ways,' DJ Neff told design:related.
'We weren't creating just a campaign, we were creating a multi-faceted, interactive brand experience from the ground up.'
'Also, knowing the client would want to track results in real time, we felt integrating with Facebook gave us a lot of advantages in exposure and instant communication between the brand and its enthusiasts,' he added.
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