Sunday, January 3, 2010

Company Spotlight: Chiquita Banana



Somehow I stumbled on the Chiquita Banana website over the weekend and was really pleasantly surprised.  I believe that simple, household names have amazing opportunity in social media (like Skittles or Butterball Turkey) because they don't have much to explain about the product and can focus on helping or entertaining people. Everyone knows what a Chiquita Banana is so there's no introduction of new technology or updates to the product to explain.
The Chiquita site has a large number of activities from designing the sticker on the front to a dance off to Chiquita health benefits so I spent a good 15 to 20 minutes there just poking around.
What They've Done Right:
The site is well designed and thought out so this is definitely a nice move forward for Chiquita.   I noticed that they are collecting e-mails and data from visitors by asking people to log in so that they can save their sticker designs.  This is going to help them build a nice e-mail list of people who are actively engaging with their brand (hint: CEO's really like to see lists like these in the ROI reports).  They also have all of the standard "Follow us on Twitter" and Facebook connecting options so that fans of the brand can continuously connect with them. When I checked out the Twitter feed, the updates were interesting although their followers were a bit low. 
What They Should Do More Of:
The site feels a little insulated, like a game.  Since the setting of the site is a street it might be cool to have a "graffiti wall" with comments from other visitors or a way to engage with each other on the site more. 
Also, and I think this is the main issue, they should promote the site in other places.  I saw the exact same problem with the Milk site a few years ago.  The brand blows their whole budget on the cool site and then doesn't save anything for promotion so the traffic to this amazing site has stayed relatively low.
Lastly, it could be neat to do a little spin-off campaign of the story they have going with the good and bad bananas on the site.  For example, make a Twitter feed for the bad banana character and write updates from him. 

Overall, really cool site worth checking out!

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1 Comments:

Blogger Royce said...

I feel like they should also find a way to incorporate the first vignette in this video

January 4, 2010 at 12:54 PM  

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