Bomb Pop, the frozen ice deal with formed like a rocket, has been driving a few of the greatest gross sales and consciousness outcomes for the practically 70-year-old model by reallocating its media spend over the previous yr to prioritize social media over conventional promoting whereas additionally integrating a gaming technique.
By tuning into media platforms like TikTok, Snapchat and Roblox, the model is best capable of embrace the tradition and developments related to its goal tween viewers, serving to ship a 26% year-over-year enhance in gross sales and a ten.5% enhance in model consciousness.
All through, changing digital engagement into purchases has been a precedence. This features a social media activation with actor Gavin Casalegno of Amazon Prime’s “The Summer season I Turned Fairly” and artist Andrey Azizov to promote Bomb Pop-inspired merchandise, together with cameras, coolers, t-shirts, towels and a volleyball, via a digital pop-up retailer. Entry to the product line was granted by scanning the product with a Bomb Pop Snapchat Lens.
“Tweens’ style and pursuits are regularly evolving, so we’ve adopted a technique of availability, connection and innovation,” stated Santhi Ramesh, chief business officer for Bomb Pop guardian Wells Enterprises. “We wish to be out there in locations the place they’re naturally going. We wish to join with them in methods which are interesting, and we wish them to have the ability to categorical themselves and be free to be who they’re.”
Model mission
Advertising and marketing a summer season seasonal product equivalent to a frozen deal with has its challenges. The stress is on to make a complete yr’s price of objectives in a scant three months. And when the goal market is tweens, who’re notoriously fickle and never essentially repeat clients yr after yr, entrepreneurs should work additional exhausting to remain nimble. For Bomb Pop, this has included making the most of distinctive media alternatives that don’t really feel like promoting.
In July 2022, the model launched a first-of-its-kind media purchase on TikTok that mixed a branded mission, hashtag problem and branded impact competitors, ensuing within the model’s greatest July 4th gross sales ever.
The model rapidly adopted this with an activation via Roblox that gave it a presence inside the Restaurant Tycoon 2 recreation. In partnership with Moonrock Labs and Gale, the model introduced its signature three-color look to varied merchandise inside gameplay and made the treats a sellable product within the recreation. Over the three-week marketing campaign, gamers “bought” greater than 48 million Bomb Pops, greater than doubling the model’s 20 million digital gross sales aim.
“We all know that tweens are very into gaming, however constructing a recreation [from scratch] is extraordinarily labor intensive, and we needed to make sure we had been including worth,” stated Lindsey Model, artistic director at Gale. “With our partnership with Moonrock Labs and Roblox we had been capable of combine Bomb Pop right into a recreation they had been already enjoying in an genuine method. It wasn’t promoting to them, and it bought extra Bomb Pops.”
Summer season feeling
A few of these current successes are born out of the model’s and company’s deep understanding of its tween goal, together with paying shut consideration to what they’re liking and producing on social media.
“We do our analysis and we’re continuously analyzing their pursuits,” Ramesh stated. “Once we observe social media content material, we all know what they’re posting and reacting to, and that provides us clues about what their ardour factors are.”
Given the sensitivities round advertising and marketing to kids, Ramesh and Model additionally be certain that any info collected is anonymized and that the content material they create and distribute is used responsibly.
“We’re not pushing content material, however we’re making it out there to them,” Ramesh stated.
Simply as crucially, the company and model profit from having good relationships with digital platforms to allow them to perceive and capitalize on new instruments as they’re developed.
“For the entire activations, we work with the platforms as true partnerships,” Model stated. “We wish to make sure that it really works for the platform, simply as a lot as it really works for our audiences.”
Although the calendar could also be heading into the colder months, the model has no plans to decelerate. By the winter, Bomb Pop will give attention to the hotter areas of the US with a message of recapturing a “summer season feeling” for a snack.
“We have now recognized the place summer season is year-round,” Ramesh stated. “I don’t wish to goal Chicago, however I wish to goal the Texases and the Floridas of the world. Bomb Pop sells 4 occasions the nationwide common in these areas, even in December, so why would we restrict the advertising and marketing to the top of September?”
