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The category team at Del Monte faces a unique challenge: it’s hard to innovate a banana. When you can’t iterate on the product, it all comes down to marketing. Del Monte is already an expert in produce harvesting, logistics, etc. but is facing a new opportunity: the need to create great new brands that bring consumers to their produce. How can they create branding that differentiates their banana from their competitors’?
Content & Research, Tastewise
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To make matters more complicated, the category of bananas had seen a significant drop in retail sales and consumer interaction. Del Monte needed to find a way to reinvigorate the category, given steep competition from two primary competitors in the market and the rise of more specialty fruits, like super fruits, creating distraction from historically well-established categories -- like bananas.
Del Monte's category team needed to:
The solution in differentiating produce is to have a story that adds value to the actual ingredient (in this case, a banana). Typically, Del Monte relied on static retail data; today, they’ve also introduced Tastewise to understand what is happening in customer consumption and menu presence.
Using Tastewise, the team:
The team used Tastewise to complement and reinforce insights they pulled from retail: that bananas were losing share across the board with consumers and losing traction to more popular, "trendy" fruits. This validation was the starting point needed to create a new, compelling story that would “bring bananas back to the minds of consumers”.
This story resulted in a successful campaign introducing Del Monte's new organic banana line, which in turn increased sales of the product and brought interest back to the category.
The Del Monte team is now able to: