Class: MKTG 5118 - Marketing Capstone
Lecturer: Dennis Paris
Prompt: Develop a marketing strategy to work toward goals defined by the client for the product assigned.
Company/Brand: Kraft Heinz - Good Seasons Salad Dressing Mix
It’s like we ran a full lap around the track at school—Started with Dennis, ended with Dennis. Develop a full marketing strategy for a product both times, the only difference is the client is actually in on it the second time.
When I started the Strategic Advertising and Marketing program at Temple University in 2019, I worked with a talented bunch on a full marketing strategy plan for Kraft Heinz’s Smart Ones frozen meals. We created such havoc on campus with the project, Fox School of Business’ news department ran an article on us and we were given special permission to use the faculty recording studio to present our final again, but this time recorded. We were famous for, like, a week.
Anyway, finishing up the program, the same bunch of us (sans Gary) ended up in Dennis’ class again for our capstone where we would be doing the same thing, except no textbook reading, little classroom learning (more like refreshing!), and generous teamwork time.
Our hope was that we’d get to work together again, but each of us (Amanda, Jojo, Alyssa, and myself) were each placed in a different group. Luckily, in my group, we all knew one another since we were in the same classes every semester for two years.
I wish I could say we put in the same amount of time my original group did on the first project, but since all of us held full time jobs that ended at different hours of the evening with other obligations during other free times, we mostly worked individually and came together when absolutely necessary to tie everything together. Satisfactorily, it worked well that way. We worked together mostly in class and through text messages, pulling together things like our survey (which accumulated 579 responses in a week), ideas for how we would tackle the strategy and assembling our two key presentations for the semester. What also helped is we were each strong at something, which made putting together the puzzle easy. Yours truly handled most of the creative, which you’ll see below.
Good Seasons’ current logo
Once we combed through our survey responses and analyzed the data, we were able to make informed decisions throughout the course of the project. We steered the product in a direction KH’s representative wasn’t expecting (and at first didn’t understand). The target provided to us was, broadly, Millennials. We narrowed the focus down to Millennial women, aged 24-35 , living in/around the city with a significant other, working. Our target has a busy lifestyle, and tries to eat and be healthy. Good Seasons is a brand that’s been around since the early-mid 1900s (I can’t remember the decade exactly), but currently has little advertising, almost no connection with their target audience, zero social media presence, minimal web presence, and like…they just exist.
For the most part, Millennials who heard of Good Seasons grew up in households that used Good Seasons. Otherwise, it wasn’t Millennials who were familiar with and regularly purchased the product, it was Gen X and older.
Good Seasons logo redesign with tagline
By changing the core messaging and positioning of Good Seasons from being a delicious dressing mix for your family to excite their dinner salads, we turned it to it being a delicious all-purpose seasoning mix here for your convenience. We played on the low cost and ease of use of the product to pitch our ideas. Although we understood nostalgia played a big part in the percentage of the target audience who was already hooked, we needed to leverage that to give the brand edge—not your mom’s good seasons! We harped on the fact Good Seasons’ packaging and logo was in dire need of an upgrade and its overall presence needed to broadcast much further than just on the store shelves.
We also took it a step further and pitched the idea of working with micro influencers. A few at a time first, and as the brand’s awareness grew, the number of influencers partnering with the brand would grow, too. These influencers would get PR boxes with packets of flavor, the famous cruet kit, coupons, recipe cards, codes to share with followers, and other novelty goodies. On top of that, we proposed a future line extension that includes two sizes of shakers to let consumers know it’s more than just salad dressing.
For our final presentation, we had prototypes to show the class and back up our creative proposals. Peep the carousel of images below. :) We also had charts of numbers for media planning (not shown) as well as sample advertisement presentations.
Not shown: website proposal and target profiles (done by Emma RT.), Good Seasons stylized packet photoshoot (done by Kristina K.), social media profiles (done by Alyssa R.)
Audio ads can be heard here:
This post doesn’t go into as much detail as this project owns, but I hope it was enough to give you a glimpse of what went into the creative portion.
I’m very proud of our group and what we accomplished this semester.
Next stop: graduation!