Via Yahoo, The Wall Street Journal offers a case study destined for Intro to Marketing textbooks. It’s a fluff piece for the Brilliance of Culturally-Conscious Marketing. Pbbbfffttt!
So in China in 2006 Kraft remade the Oreo itself, introducing for the first time an Oreo that looked almost nothing like the original.
It’s as if I’m supposed to believe the oreo was some great sacred cow, never altered in the States. Who cares what it looks like? Has the writer never heard of the Oreo Ice Cream Novelty? Oreo breakfast cereal? Peanut butter oreos! DOUBLE-STUFF?!?
My favorite bit was this…
In China, Kraft began a grassroots marketing campaign to educate Chinese consumers about the American tradition of pairing milk with cookies. The company created an Oreo apprentice program at 30 Chinese universities that drew 6,000 student applications.
Three hundred of the applicants were trained to become Oreo brand ambassadors. Some of the students rode around Beijing on bicycles outfitted with wheel covers resembling Oreos and handed out cookies to more than 300,000 consumers. Others held Oreo-themed basketball games to reinforce the idea of dunking cookies in milk.
Let’s hope those Early Adopters are adopting dental insurance, too.
The article states that pre-2005 Oreos were just too sweet for the Chinese market. As Kyle the Manchurian Candidate showed in his hilarious Oreo post from 2006, lagging sales may have been the result of other forces.
[image from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mybloodyself/.]