Are Your Customers SCREAMING to be Engaged?

Here’s an idea that would have gotten you tossed out of business school just a few years ago: Take a multi-million dollar consumer brand like Doritos and turn it over to a bunch of 13 to 24 year-olds. Let them expand the product line, develop advertising campaigns and assume total control of the product’s image. A recipe for success you wonder, or the ingredients of a disaster?

That’s exactly what the folks at Frito Lay Canada did with their Become the Doritos Guru contest that ended in May.

The 11-week program encouraged consumers to come up with a new flavor for the Doritos tortilla chip brand and create a 30-second video commercial introducing it. To make things interesting Frito Lay Canada offered a $25,000 first prize and a 1% royalty on future sales of the product.

Using a social media strategy, combined with some traditional integrated marketing techniques, the contest, which obviously doubled as an ad campaign, produced phenomenal results. A quick look at the numbers tells much of the story:

There were over 2,000 official entries

There were 1.5 million unique visitors to the contest’s YouTube page

The Doritos Guru FaceBook page attracted 30,000 fans

Sales of Doritos in Canada jumped 22% during the contest

By letting so much user-generated content (UGC) go viral through their consumers’ social networks, Frito Lay Canada was able to engage their target audience in a way that simply would not have been possible a few years ago.

To be sure, there were other things happening in the background:

Doritos partnered with MuchMusic, a Canadian music video channel, who aired several of the videos under a “Doritospiece Theatre” banner. MuchMusic even had their VJs screen and critique several of the entries.

An in-store retail program hyped the contest by using special displays that featured white bags of Doritos with a dollar sign ($) on the front.

The contest was promoted on Xbox Live games like Guitar Hero 4 and Transformers. (Yet another gaming connection.)

Oh, and how about the winner? A 21 year-old Concordia film student, Ryan Coopersmith, and seven of his friends created a video showing people ranting, raving, and yelling in everyday situations. Though it sounds like anger management gone awry, it was oddly appropriate for their new flavor: Screamcheese (watch video).

The video cost Coopersmith and his team (aka Boo Ya Pictures) all of $300. While estimates of what one percent of future Screamcheese sales could mean for the group (Frito Lay Canada says it will likely be a six figure number), the filmmakers are wasting no time on their road to success. They are investing $15,000 of their winnings into their first feature film. Look out Sundance.

Not surprisingly, Frito Lay has already expressed a desire to maintain a relationship with Boo Ya Pictures. They’ll probably “do lunch” and discuss the future while sipping premium energy drinks and nibbling on Screamcheese Doritos.

The take-home lesson: Giving consumers influence over your brand is going to happen whether you like it or not, so why not collaborate with them on the new frontier. Now there's something to scream about!