When it comes to marketing, Ferrara Pan has remained low key,
avoiding fancy ads and million dollar endorsements favored by big
spenders and embraced the low cost, highly effective,
non-traditional tactic of guerilla marketing. M2W’s brand
strategy saw potential in this tactic, executing grass-root level
events that reached a mass market of teens and “tweens” between
10 to 25 years in age. In 2008, we focused on Ferrara Pan’s top 10 distribution markets,
which included Los Angeles, Chicago, Atlanta, Salt Lake City and Detroit. These targeted guerilla marketing events ranged from mainstream artist Concert Samplings (Hannah Montana, Justin Timberlake), College Football Tailgate and College Basketball March Madness Samplings. Among the three nationwide initiatives, we executed 125 events in 35 markets during a 9 month period. These programs maintained a sample rate of over 8,000 units per event, approximately 1,000,000 units total. Total dollars spent: $115k.

In 2009, we took the next big step in developing relationships with teens and young adults — experiential event marketing. In August 2009, we raised our experiential marketing bar at ESPN’s Summer X Games 14 in Los Angles, CA. As an exhibiting sponsor at SXG 14, we featured a 10’ x 20’ Lemonhead booth, tying an “EPIC and EXTREME” theme tailored for our demographic. Our on-site execution included a Spin-to-win wheel, a free custom graphic branded picture for all fans and a branded surf board and skate deck sweepstakes. We had a total of 8,000 promotional give-a-ways (branded lip balm, wrist bands and rally towels) along with 49,000 units of Lemonheads and Chewy Lemonhead and Friends. On this perfect weekend at the Home Depot Center, we engaged a record attendance of 110,000 sports enthusiasts. During these four days, the Lemonhead booth was the busiest booth among the 30 exhibitors, attracting lines of people 90 deep with a wait time of nearly 15 minutes. Total dollars spent: $49k.

Taking it to the next level: Winter X Games 14 — Aspen, Colorado. In January 2010, we will be squeezing the biggest lemon we’ ve seen so far…introducing Social Media Marketing, a form of internet marketing that seeks to achieve branding and marketing goals by participating in certain social media networks such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The driving force behind this form of marketing is the ability to interact directly among brand enthusiasts and evangelists by using real-time images, video content, blogs and audio exposure. Ferrara Pan will be executing a first-time product launch for Tropical Lemonheads in a “beach-like” atmosphere with an on-site surf shop theme in the middle of winter in Aspen, Colorado. Our strategy will be to sample all three brands, allow consumers to become “fans” of our Lemonhead Facebook page and upload real-time images. We will encourage these fans to register to win a snow and surf board in our custom designed surf shop booth as we capture their information on Wi-Fi computers. We will have a video crew on-site capturing footage and interviews of patrons that love our product, which will be edited and uploaded to You-Tube instantly.