Health Food Brands | Yogurt | Probiotic | Dannon Activia

But now that Activia has cracked the code on how to appeal to American consumers about the sensitive topic of “gut health,” that doesn’t mean the success of every new probiotic product is assured. Just ask Kraft, for instance, whose LiveActive cheese failed to catch on -- and even Yoplait, Dannon’s giant rival, whose own probiotic-yogurt line has struggled.

“Dannon showed that its ‘feel the benefit’ marketing strategy for Activia can work just as well in the United States as anywhere else,” said Julian Mellentin, editor of New Nutrition Business, a global trade magazine chronicling better-for-you developments in the food and beverage industries. “But Yoplait has had a me-too strategy, weak marketing execution – and an apparent determination to ignore the rules for success in food and health.”

When the global industry targeted probiotics at American consumers several years ago, Activia long had been successful — as Actimel — in Europe. The Japanese “little-bottle” brand of probiotic yogurt drink, Yakult, was popular worldwide. And a fundamental principle of how Dannon had succeeded with Actimel / Activia around the world was that people of different cultures have more similarities than differences when it comes to digestive health.

Yet the brandmeisters at Dannon and elsewhere believed that U.S. consumers were more queasy about the topic than Europeans and Asians and less ready to abide direct messages about digestive health, regularity and other such topics. In fact, a research outfit contracted by Dannon to help determine positioning for the U.S. market documented the differences.

In Europe, for instance, nearly all of the insights and messages about probiotic yogurt that resonated with consumes were negative, such as, “Are you bloated?” But with American consumers, virtually all of the messages that resonated were positive – and they didn’t want to hear about “negative” positioning.

So Dannon adapted its universal marketing approach at least somewhat to American sensibilities, mounting a two-week “New You Challenge” promotion to help consumers “feel the difference” that Activia would make in they felt within just 14 days. It also harnessed personal testimonials in TV advertising for Activia. And, of course, over the last couple of years, actress Jamie Lee Curtis has carried the load for the brand with a series of TV spots that have become such a part of the cultural discourse that they have merited spoofs on NBC’s Saturday Night Live.

Dannon’s “hybrid” approach to the U.S. market has worked wonders for Activia. From a standing start in 2006, premium-priced Activia sales quickly grew to $130 million that year in U.S. outlets measured by Information Resources Inc., which tracks sales in supermarkets, drug stores and mass merchandisers except Wal-Mart. By last year, IRI-measured sales of Activia had neared $400 million, up 16 percent over 2008 – and that during a global economic crisis and worldwide recession that leveled sales of many other pricey grocery products.

Among the mistakes Yoplait has made are downgrading its initially strong digestive-health positioning in marketing and packaging, a sign of what Mellentin called “strategic timidity” on the brand’s part. YoPlus obviously also has been hurt by much lower overall marketing support than Activia has enjoyed.

General Mills has tried to rally the sub-brand by introducing a “reformulated” YoPlus early this year, with an added 20 percent of the required daily amounts of vitamins A and E. It now also is positioning YoPlus as beneficial not only to digestive health but also immune systems and, with added calcium and Vitamin D, bone health.

However, Kraft’s experience proves that it takes more than brazen digestive-health positioning to succeed with probiotic products. Introduced in 2007, Kraft’s LiveActive probiotic snacking cheeses already were deemed a “disappointment” to the company early last year by Kraft CEO Irene Rosenfeld. Among Kraft’s failures seems to have been believing that cheese – a product about whose overall healthfulness consumers are ambivalent – would be as appealing a vehicle for probiotic bacteria as yogurt is.

Nevertheless, Activia continues to focus single-mindedly on digestive health. And other brands are trying to harness lessons from Activia and succeed where Yoplait and Kraft have not. In the U.S., for instance, new products based on probiotic positioning have ranged from GoodBelly fruit juices, a company launched by Silk soy-milk brand founder Steve Demos, to Naked Pizza, a fast-growing restaurant startup that proudly promotes its pizza as probiotic.

And in Europe and elsewhere, probiotics-based innovations keep coming – some of them taking consumers beyond digestive-health messaging per se. Unilever debuted Latta, a probiotic margarine spread, in Germany last year. Bravo Friscus is a new Swedish brand extension aimed at probiotic remedying of the common cold. And a New Zealand company, BLIS Technologies, has launched an anti-sore-throat probiotic called K12. d is a new Swedish juice.

The flourishing sales of probiotic products – like the good bacteria they nurture in the human intestine – suggests promising things for the future of this nutritional technology. And now that Americans have proven we can handle talking about gut health, U.S. consumers will benefit along with the rest of the world.

[4-Jun-2010]

Dale Buss is a journalist and editorial consultant in Rochester Hills, Michigan. He's a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal and writes about marketing and branding for a variety of publications.


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