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.
