Meet Skip, a friendly sort of kid who'll soon be frequenting your local supermarket.
He's approachable, perhaps a little mischievous, but clearly one cool dude, ready for action on his peanut-patterned surfboard. His goal is an ambitious one: He's joining such supermarket notables as Kellogg's Frosted Flakes' Tony the Tiger and Chester Cheetah and hopes to capture kids' attention and, more important, their parents' grocery dollars.
Brought to you by Skippy Peanut Butter, Skip will start to appear nationally at the end of March on boxes of Skippy's newest product, Skippy Squeeze Stix. This latest food-in-a-tube snack is certainly important for Skippy, the second-best-selling peanut butter on the market. It also lands at the intersection of three important trends for contemporary food products aimed at children: cartoon imagery; food as fun; and portability, which is what marketers call the ability to eat a food anywhere, any time. Skippy is not alone at this ever-more-crowded intersection, but it's the first to go this far with peanut butter.
The trend toward making food "fun" for children can be seen throughout the aisles of any well-stocked supermarket. H.J. Heinz Co., which devised its venerable tomato ketchup back in 1876, today produces fun with green and purple ketchup. That's an invention that "adults found gross, but kids came up with it -- it wasn't our idea," said Robin Teets, spokesman for Heinz. The company listened: "Per capita, kids are the biggest consumers of ketchup," he said. Over in the frozen-food aisle, there are Funky Fries, blue french fries created by the Ore-Ida division of Heinz. Think of the possible color combinations at dinner as kids aim those flexible EZ Squirt bottles at the Kool Blue spuds on the plate.
Then over in the refrigerated section are Oscar Mayer Lunchables, which in 1988 became the first entrant into the "lunch kit" category. The early boxed lunches were fun -- and, yes, portable -- and they were just mini-size slices of ham and cheese. But now some offer squeezable yogurt or a tortilla, making food even more entertaining by letting the kids squirt their lunch or make a wrap sandwich. "Kids like to be in control," says Sarah Delea of Oscar Mayer, a part of Kraft Foods. "And they love to build things."
It's no secret why food manufacturers are courting children, seeking their opinions and listening to their ideas in focus groups. Kids are estimated to spend as much as $35 billion directly, of which at least $10 billion is on food and drink. Overall, kids-marketing experts estimate that children directly influence as much as $300 billion in family purchases, helping parents decide which brands of food and clothing to buy. Indirectly, they influence another $200 billion -- or more -- when families decide which kind of car to drive or vacation to take.
That's why Skip's story is not just about peanuts.
Pushing peanut butter from the flat plastic squeeze tube may be fun for kids -- it's also something they can do anywhere with no need for knife, fork, spoon or bread. And that addresses that buzzword, portability.
"Portability is huge today, as much a function of the fact that people are on the go and don't have time," said Paul Kurnit, head of the marketing consulting firm KidShop. With the exception of dinner, "the classic mealtime occasion -- where people sit down and have a meal -- is gone," he said. "More often than not, people take their meals with them." And kids, in particular, eat as many as six meals a day, making portable snacks a perfect opportunity for food manufacturers.
That helps explain why Lunchables has been considered such a success and why a host of other on-the-go products has followed suit, such as General Mills' Milk 'n Cereal Bars, where Cocoa Puffs and Honey Nut Cheerios and other cereals are combined with milk to make the bar the nutritional equivalent of a bowl of cereal and milk.
Up to now, "most peanut butter is eaten in sandwiches," said Ellen Zimmerman, senior associate brand manager of Skippy, which is a division of Unilever Bestfoods. "But sandwiches are not convenient enough for today's consumers, especially for kids who are so active. We needed to generate a portable peanut butter snack to keep up with them."
Annual sales of peanut butter totaled $856.3 million in 2002, a 3.4 percent increase over 2001, according to the marketing data firm Information Resources Inc. Jif is the market leader, accounting for about 32 percent of the product's sales. Skippy is second, with a 23 percent share of the market. Supermarket brands come third at 20 percent, while Peter Pan has a 12 percent share.
Compared with other aisles of the supermarket, "there has not been much innovation" in the peanut butter aisle, Zimmerman said, except for a whole host of new flavors and blends. But a couple of recent entries have addressed the portability issue. Smucker's, for instance, sells Snackers, a package of crackers, peanut butter and jelly to meet the demands of the on-the-run kid. They also sell Uncrustables -- little round frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that will thaw in a lunch box by lunchtime. With the exception of Uncrustables, most traditional peanut butter products have not specifically targeted kids. "That's pretty amazing considering kids are such important peanut-butter eaters," said Martha Seidner Gelber, vice president of Smith Design Associates, a brand-design agency that has been helping Skippy design the image and "personality" of its product for more than five years.
That's where Skip comes in.
The friendly-looking surfer dude represents the first time that Skippy has used a character to promote its product -- and he's part of the overall goal of hooking kids on Skippy early. Market leader Jif likes to say "Choosy Mothers Choose Jif," but if Skippy has its way, kids who eat Squeeze Stix now will choose Skippy when they become moms.
That's a long-term marketing strategy that's worked well in the past, said Jane Lacher, vice president of strategic planning for G Whiz, an advertising agency specializing in youth marketing and entertainment. "Why do you think Flintstone vitamins are the top-selling kids' vitamins? It's not because the Flintstones are the hottest characters these days. It's because mothers remember taking it themselves and they buy it for their kids."
It's no surprise that kids think differently than adults. The products they like are gooier, sweeter, cheesier, grosser, faster, wilder and more colorful than typical adult food, Kurnit said. They like to be able to play with -- or "experience" -- their food. And they love characters. Characters not only make it clear the product is strictly for them, but for smaller children who can't read, characters such as Tony the Tiger and Fruit Loops' Toucan Sam help them clearly identify the product.
But before the Skip character was developed, there was the idea of eating peanut butter out of a flat plastic tube.
The tube concept was not revolutionary. In fact, food marketing experts now ask why it took Skippy -- or any peanut butter company -- so long to come up with the idea, considering the quick success that came to General Mills after it introduced Yoplait's Go-Gurt in 1998. Go-Gurt made it easier for kids to eat yogurt (not even a spoon is needed), and with such bold flavors as Cool Cotton Candy and Watermelon Meltdown, all of a sudden kids who never before ate yogurt were demanding the 21/4-ounce tubes, leading to $120 million in Go-Gurts sales in 2001, according to IRI sales data.
Go-Gurt's success prompted a number of copycats, including ConAgra's Squeez 'n Go "portable pudding," X-treme Jell-O gel sticks and Mott's Fruit Blasters.
Even though Squeeze Stix is a latecomer to the tube phenomenon, Tom Vierhile, executive editor of Productscan Online, which tracks new products, considers it "innovative, because it turns peanut butter from an ingredient into a snack by virtue of its packaging."
The success of Go-Gurt made it easy for Skippy to get the corporate go-ahead to develop the Squeeze Stix -- even though some adults have had trouble with the concept. As Zimmerman said, "We heard from a lot of adults: 'You eat this alone?' They were desperately trying to find a host food to eat with it. But kids are so familiar with the whole tube-food phenomenon that when we did research, we saw they had no qualms about putting it right into their mouths. They love peanut butter so much they want to eat it straight."
The product that's in the seven-inch-long tube is not that much different from what's in the jar. "We had to process it a little differently to get it into the tubes, but it's the same creamy consistency" and has the same nutritional value as the spread in the jar, Zimmerman said. It comes in two flavors: creamy and chocolate. (That's probably because the chunky version is more of an adult-acquired taste.)
To make Squeeze Stix a success, Skippy officials knew they had to market it to both parents and kids. But as any kid -- or parent -- knows, these two groups don't always agree on what's cool or good to eat.
Yet to market to one group and not the other would be a mistake, said Dave Siegel, president of Wonder Group, a youth-marketing advertising consulting firm. Siegel cited the experience of Ragu (another Unilever Bestfoods product) when it introduced Ragu Express, a pasta-and-sauce meal that's ready to eat in 31/2 minutes. Sales of the new product were good, but below the company's expectations because Ragu targeted its ads almost entirely to moms.
"If you're going to sell to children, you have to target them because today's moms ask their kids what they want," Siegel said. "They don't buy products that their kids don't want, and kids won't want a product unless they know about it." By marketing to kids, Siegel said, "people say we're capitalizing on kids, taking advantage of them. We're not; we're capitalizing on today's family, and in that family the child is more involved in the purchasing and decision-making process" than ever before.
That may stem from marketing, but marketers like to say it's because of the parents, many of whom are Gen Xers, the disenfranchised population that is now making sure that their children's generation is enfranchised.
Zimmerman doesn't really see any obstacles in getting today's parents to buy Squeeze Stix. After all, she noted, peanut butter is "packed with protein."
Food manufacturers, especially those marketing to kids, are on the defensive these days as recent government statistics show that 15 percent of children and adolescents are overweight, up from 11 percent in a little more than a decade. But Zimmerman makes no apology for her product. "Compared to other options," she said, "most moms are happy as clams if kids are eating peanut butter."
From the beginning of the project, Zimmerman added, "there was a mandate" to come up with a character to represent Squeeze Stix, because characters are "a very obvious cue" that the product is for kids. The question was what kind of character.
Based on marketing studies and the experiences of others, Skippy knew what the character should not be. If it were too babyish, it would alienate the older kids; that's why Skippy didn't even consider using kid's writing on the packaging. "That attracts Grandma but turns kids off," Gelber said.
Additionally, the character needed to be older than the age of the kids Skippy was trying to attract -- 6- to 12-year-olds -- because "kids always are looking toward the next stage."
What's more, if the character were a girl, it would polarize boys who typically balk at buying "girl products." Girls, on the other hand, "are more flexible, more tolerant" and will buy products where boys are the promotional character, Gelber said.
At the same time, any character that appealed to kids couldn't be so evil, threatening or outrageous to antagonize the parents.
After a false start or two, Skippy started testing a cartoon character, male of course. The choices were narrowed to three: One had spiky hair, cool-looking sunglasses and a slight smirk. The kids liked it, but the moms said he looked like a scoundrel. Another version was a little scrawnier, with slicked-back hair and smaller sunglasses. A lot of kids thought he was too nerdy.
The third character had spiky hair too, but it was drawn to look like it was blowing in the wind. He had a wide smile and open arms and his glasses were not too large, not too small. In focus groups, boys and girls and moms all liked him, found him friendly, approachable and, most important, cool and fun. Skip was born.
His face will soon be on the boxes that will start being shipped out nationwide early next month.
A box of six Squeeze Stix, amounting to a total of 5.4 ounces, costs the same as an 18-ounce jar of Skippy -- about $2.50 in the Washington area.
But consumers are willing to pay that much, Zimmerman said, noting that in study after study, portable product after portable product, "consumers are willing to pay extra for convenience."
Along with Squeeze Stix, Skippy will also be selling Skippy Squeeze It, a 9-ounce tube of peanut butter with a cap designed to easily spread the product without a knife.
For now, kids-marketing experts believe Skippy's latest convenience packaging will give it an edge in the competitive fight to attract kids' attention and parents' dollars.
But not for long, they add. "Will everyone have their own version of peanut butter in a tube in a couple of years? Probably," said Lacher of G Whiz. At that point, if Skippy wants to keep up in the market, "it will have to reinvent the wheel all over again."
