Toddy on Facebook

Toddy - one of Brazil's coolest brands among millennials - is now on Facebook where fans can see in real-time how three cutting-edge Brazilian graffitti artists (Cusco, Carla Barth, Estudio Alice) are collaborating on the cow that is part of the Sao Paulo Cow Parade exhibit.  

Check it out.

Learning from the Seda Co-Creation Project

Last week we invited Erik Galardi - Unilever Brazil's Marketing Director Haircare - to talk to our internal team on how he is carrying out a major brand transformation for Seda.  The presentation was absolutely awesome, one of the best marketing stories I heard recently.  Seda is Brazil`s leading shampoo but has been losing relevance to smaller high-end brands which led to the Seda Co-Creation Project.  They partnered with seven hair specialists from around the world to develop a new generation of products.  Another great case of collaboration, packaging design, content generation and experiential marketing.  

Fiat's collaboration project

This time its Fiat launching a collaboration project called FiatMio.  I just went to their fiatmio.cc co-creation website and posted my idea (it's always fun to provide ideas to someone else's project).  Fiat is saying they want to select the best ideas, build a concept car and showcase it in Sao Paulo's 2010 auto show.  

Another very cool collaboration project.  

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No more vanilla, strawberry or chocolate

What happens with those who market mass consumer products where it's more difficult to provide consumers with true customization?  It seems like expanding choice and inviting your die-hard fans to collaborate on what's next is picking up momentum. 

Two cool projects that I absolutely love...

Take a look at what Mountain Dew did last month....

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Walkers - UK's top-selling potato chips - also ran an amazing promotional campaign this year called "Do Us A Flavor" inviting British consumers to create a movement in favor of their favorite flavor.

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It seems like the days of "we only have vanilla, chocolate or strawberry" are over. It was about time.

Promoting Innovation Challenge Brasil 2009

Quick video to promote PepsiCo's sponsorship of the Innovation Challenge Brasil 2009 coordinated by Insper - one of Brazil's most prestigious business schools. We're excited to see creative ideas from students from around the country on how to grow the Brazilian salty snacks category. The competition starts in the following weeks.

Innovation Challenge Brazil

As you probably know by now through this blog, I truly believe marketers can benefit from a more collaborative approach to innovation. So, when Insper - one of Brazil's leading business schools - told us that they were bringing the Innovation Challenge to Brazil, we immediately decided to become one of the corporate sponsors.

Innovation Challenge is the world's largest competition involving MBA students who compete to present innovation ideas to sponsoring companies. Each company posts a specific challenge and students from around the country team up to generate innovative solutions that meet the brief. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to work on real case studies and companies have the opportunity of interacting with the next generation of leaders who will certainly bring a fresh perspective to their business models.

For two weeks, teams from different parts of Brazil will research, discuss and prepare their business plans. Submissions will be evaluated by a specialist panel leading to a final presentation on the Isper campus.

This initiative reinforces our commitment here at PepsiCo Brazil to support a more inclusive collaborative innovation process that started over a year ago with an online panel we have with 40 college students helping us with our brands targeting millenials.

Can't wait to see the results.

New Campaign on Open Science

Du Pont has initiated a campaign here in Brazil to promote its Open Science platform. Following the footsteps of P&G and IBM, here's another example of a company embracing open innovation as a way to transform the way it brings new ideas to life. With the growth of technology and a business environment that has taken a more collaborative approach, it's fascinating to see how R&D is going through a significant change. R&D teams, which used to take a very internal approach relying on their own research capabilities, are becoming more open to developing partnerships with academic institutions, NGO's or through companies like Innocentive.

New times require new thinking.

Here's the 'Open Science' TV campaign posted on Du Pont's corporate website...

Co-branding work with Azeites Gallo

In a few days, we will be launching...

Sensações® Ao Forno 

with a touch of Gallo Olive Oil 

Sensações® Ao Forno is Brazil's very first baked potato chip, targeting adults who want a great-tasting chip with gourmet-style flavors and value baked snacks.  We're excited that this is our first co-branded flavor. We teamed up with Azeites Gallo® one of Portugal's most traditional brands and Brazil's leading olive oil - in a wonderful collaboration process to develop this flavor. We're extremely proud of our association with a brand that is known for its pure, delicate and fragrant olive oil. Gallo® with its brand icon rooster, has been on the table of generations of Brazilian families.

All great brands have great stories.  In the case of Gallo® (which means 'rooster' in Spanish) it started almost a century ago with a man named Victor Guedes. One morning, he woke up opened his bedroom window to the the sound of a rooster.  Since he had Spanish roots, he registered the brand with two L's (in Portuguese 'galo' is written with one L). The brand and its beautiful rooster has stood the testament of time, coming to stand for suberb quality in olive oil delighting mediterranean style food lovers around the world.

The story of bringing two brands together in a collaborative process was an extremely rewarding experience. An amazing learning opportunity that I personally enjoyed a lot. 

Getting Doritos out of the bag and into cool places

Our Teen Snacks team, led by Carla Araujo, Alexandre Chiavegatti, Carol Gormezano and Oliver Schrikel created an on-premise initiative that takes the Doritos® brand into bars and restaurants, called Doritos® Lovers. In a true collaboration effort with students from a local culinary school and a few restaurants, recipes were created, awarded and are now being introduced in menus throughout town. Pizza Hut® has been involved in the project from its inception and now offers a crunchy pizza with Doritos. Salad Creations® has also introduced a recipe created by student Luciana Perez called Doritos Lovers Salad.

One of Sao Paulo's most traditional bars, Bar do Juarez®, is selling cheese rolls with Doritos toppings. Koi®, a cool chain of japanese restaurants just introduced a Uramaki Doritos Lovers.

Collaborative approach in new innovation course at a local university

I was invited to participate in a new academic initiative at one of São Paulo's top universities: ESPM-Escola Superior de Propaganda e Marketing. It's a 2-month course on how to use innovation as a force of business transformation. This is obviously a subject I absolutely love and I'm curious to see how it will play out. Because innovation can mean so many different things to different types of companies, it will be very interesting to see how each lecturer approaches the theme from his specific perspective. The school invited professionals with broad experience from a variety of different organizations. There is a professional with an innovation track record in tech companies, a person from banking, there are people with a consumer marketing background (like myself) and there is even an anthropologist who specializes in Brazilian food heritage and its interconnection with culture. To create a more collaborative approach between faculty and students, the school teamed up with IBM and we will be using Lotus Connections - a social network software that will hopefully help extend the learning experience beyond the classroom. 

Sounds promising.

Pre-Super Bowl buzz

Doritos® is back creating pre-Super Bowl buzz with its third edition of the 'Crash The Super Bowl' campaign.  Doritos innovated two years ago with a consumer-generated format that shook the industry and started a trend.  At the time, consumers were invited to submit 30" ads.  Two spots, were chosen online and aired during the big game.  This time around Doritos is offering a $1 million prize for a creative mind that is able to produce a Doritos TV spot good enough to top a viewer poll at the next Super Bowl.  I absolutely love how my colleagues at Frito-Lay are leading the Doritos Brand.  A bold, creative and completely consumer-centric marketing approach to a very cool brand.  Awesome work.

Experimenting with a more collaborative approach to marketing

It's been a few months now that we have been experimenting with a millenial collaboration panel. Basically, it's a panel made up of 40 college kids located on different campuses around the country who are collaborating with us on our teen brands. It all happens online in a social network-type environment. Every week we post a different stimulus, usually in a graphic format, from new product concepts to packaging to ideas on brand activation. Sometimes we ask them to answer questions on what they've been up to, what blogs they're reading or what they're carrying in their backpacks. These kids are what our research consultancy calls alphas, people who are slightly ahead of everyone else and are key influencers among their group. Because of that, the project took longer to set up than I had originally imagined. It was absolutely critical to find the right people. Going over their bios it's amazing the breadth of life experiences and interests.

I'm a huge fan of adopting a more collaborative approach to marketing. So, bringing this project to life has been a rewarding intellectual experience. I feel the days of the old focus groups are over. The feedback we get is a little glimpse in the minds of a fascinating demographic. We've been having fun.

Getting kids to imagine, create and invent

I fell in love with this campaign from InventNow.org and sponsored by the United States Patent and Trademark Office that sends a powerful message that kids can have fun through creativity and inventions. The TV campaign showcases a boy called Brian who put suction cups on his bike tires to ride in places that nobody has ridden before.  It's all about reminding kids that they can achieve anything they want in life. 

The campaign theme is "Anything's possible. Keep thinking." 

 


Having two elementary school kids of my own, the message struck an emotional chord. It's worth going to the InventNow.org website and see the hundreds of inventions submitted by kids all over America.  There's even a section that teaches kids the basics on how to patent a cool idea.

 

A beautiful message to a future generation of innovators.  

Experimenting with an online collaboration panel

Marketers all over the world are debating, re-thinking and identifying more effective ways of gathering consumer insights on an on-going basis, instead of using traditional research methods that gather input at specific moments of the marketing process.  About a year ago, inspired by a conversation with some people at IBM Brazil on the boom of web 2.0, I came back to the office and asked my team how we could adopt a more collaborative approach to brand management using the learnings from social networks.  Millenials already use social networks to interact on an infinite number of themes from the indie rock scene, to what's hot in tech gadgets, to discussion boards on video-gaming.  

Could we create a social network-type environment with college kids that have an interest for marketing to help us craft the future of our brands that target Brazilian millenials?

After talking to one of the country's hottest consumer research company, we found out the answer was yes.  Last month we launched an exciting initiative that has the potential of transforming the way we engage with one of our toughest demographics.  We put together an online consumer panel with 40 college students from around the country, carefully selected.  It has been an amazing lab into better understanding how these kids react to the weekly brand stimulus we post for their evaluation.  A much deeper and engaging experience versus focus groups or qual studies.

Nokia and Spike Lee Collaboration

Another collboration project was announced this past week... this time it's Nokia and film director Spike Lee teaming up to produce a short film using YouTube-type videos captured by everyday people using their mobile phones. One more example of the power of user-generated content.

Another Collaboration Initiative... this one from Starbucks

Yesterday I read in Cristiane Correa's blog (Exame Magazine's cool editor) that Starbucks® has launched a collaboration platform called mystarbucksidea.com.  Since I'm passionate about the theme of collaboration as a web 2.0 way for companies to really empower the consumer, I immediately went to check it out and register. It's great!  An online space that allows coffee lovers to post ideas on how to make Starbucks a better place.  By the end of the day I thought I had an original idea to post.  My idea was based on the insight that coffee drinking lends itself perfectly well to the introspective moment of reading. A moment to warm up the soul and fill up your mind. So why not have Starbucks in selected public libraries?  I've always loved a good public library but I know that many struggle financially requiring strong support from municipalities and the community.  The idea of renting out space for a coffee shop could certainly dilute the library's operating costs, relying less on public funding. So, before posting my idea (that I naively thought was original), I googled the words 'starbucks' and 'library'.  Well... I found out the idea is not original at all. There are a few examples of the model.  Well,I guess it's time to order a latte and think of an original idea.

Connecting to Brazilian Soccer Fans

It's amazing how Nike seems to always be ahead of the game when it comes to making an emotional connection to fans at a very local level.  For Brazilians, the news that Ronaldo was hospitalized last week and may be away from the beautiful game for the next nine months was devastating.  Nike Brazil quickly set up a hotsite allowing fans to post messages, send an SMS or upload a photo to wish him a fast recovery.  I absolutely love the message "Nunca Desista" (never give up) which is a feeling that is so much part of Brazilian culture.  Just brilliant.  

Click here to leave your message to Ronaldo "O Fenomeno"!

Collaboration Model for the Amateur Journalist in All of Us

While following the Presidential Elections on CNN and their website, I was positively surprised with how viewers have been actively using iReport - CNN's user-generated reporting initiative. Today I read that CNN will be expanding iReport into a stand-alone website to be hosted at iReport.com. Viewers will be able to upload video, audio, photos and breaking news reports from their home towns, as well as, rate content and embed it elsewhere on the internet. The new site will be moderated to avoid fake reporting and inaccuracies.  As a huge fan of collaboration models, it's great to see the concept expanding to so many different applications. 

Doritos Crash The Super Bowl Campaign

Last year's Super Bowl winner was... Doritos® with its 'Crash The Super Bowl' campaign. It was a fantastic case of collaborative marketing where consumers were invited to post 30" spots for the tortilla brand. The most voted spot was aired in the Super Bowl half time.  The campaign was awarded USA Today Best Ad 2007 and Time Magazine's Top 10 in 2007).

This year, Doritos® has invited consumers to post their amateur music videos at MySpaceTV and thousands are voting for their favorites. The most voted band will win a contract and a 60" video will be aired in the 2008 Super Bowl on Feb. 3.  In the U.S. market, Doritos® has been an early adopter of a consumer-generated model and is making marketing history.  Congratulations to the Frito-Lay Marketing Team for leading the way when it comes to a more inclusive collaboration-style marketing!

http://www.myspace.com/doritoscrashthesuperbowl

This Year's Theme at Davos... The Power of Collaborative Innovation

I was positively surprised to see that the theme of this year’s World Economic Forum in Davos, which starts tomorrow, is “The Power of Collaborative Innovation”. For five days, leaders in government, academia, media and from the business world, will discuss the most significant world affairs. From a marketing perspective, we have been covering on this blog how collaborative innovation is a powerful concept that converts consumers and key stakeholders into active participants in the process of ideation, concept development and validation of product development. Read what was written in today’s International Herald Tribune by Klaus Schwab founder of the World Economic Forum… “…my intuition is that those leaders joining us in Davos this week understand that, in the current global context, collaboration and innovation are highly undervalued concepts - particularly in a world that is shifting from mono-polar, hierarchical structures to multi-polar, flat networks.” 

The same goes for corporations. Smart companies looking for an environment that fosters greater innovation will also need to re-think internal structures and be more open to external input to leverage the power of collaboration.