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Conveying the Message
Dole Food Company has been selling pineapples since 1851 and today is the world's largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, fresh-cut flowers, and a growing line of packaged foods. In the mid-1990s, Dole developed a new product line to meet consumers' evolving needs, and along with the new product line came new advertising challenges.
All advertising campaigns are designed to inform, persuade, or remind customers about a product, company, or category. Ads can be used to stimulate demand for a particular category or industry, or for a specific brand, firm, or item. This activity is important because to create a successful campaign, a firm needs to identify its target market, set advertising objectives, depict its product, evaluate and select media, create the ad, and assess the ad's impact. The goal of this activity is for you to demonstrate an understanding of the steps in designing and executing an advertising campaign.
Read the case below and answer the questions that follow.
In 1999, Dole stepped out of its traditional canned pineapple product category and introduced the Fruit Bowl. Using clever advertising, the company then successfully repositioned the product for a different target market in 2002.
Dole Food Company has been selling pineapples since 1851. Until the mid-1990s its main focus was canned pineapple, which it advertised primarily as an ingredient in recipes. However, consumers were spending less time on meal preparation and preferred convenience foods. So Dole developed a product that met the demand for convenience foods with Fruit Bowls: four ounces of bite-sized pieces of pineapple, mixed tropical fruits, and peaches. Because this product was designed to be consumed as a snack, not as an ingredient, it required a departure from Dole's traditional recipe-oriented advertising strategy.
Although Dole initially imagined its target market to be parents of children, its research revealed that just over half of Fruit Bowls' sales came from households without kids—specifically, professional women on the go. Based on this observation, Dole introduced several new products in 2002, including larger, 7-ounce Fruit Bowls. The initial advertising campaign for Fruit Bowls had targeted women but only as moms/family caretakers, not as health-conscious, working women pressed for time. For the new products, the advertising agency Dailey and Associates of Los Angeles targeted working women, aged 25 to 54. With the message that “Dole Fruit Bowls are fun to eat, healthy, and great on the go,” the common thread of the multimedia campaign was the tag line: “Dole. Life Is Sweet.”
By the end of 2003, volume growth at Dole also was sweet as customers continued to choose Dole's healthy snack over more traditional ones. Today, Dole is the world's largest producer and marketer of fresh fruit, fresh vegetables, fresh-cut flowers, and a growing line of packaged foods. Dole does business in more than 90 countries and employs 36,000 full-time employees as well as 23,000 full-time seasonal (or temporary) employees worldwide. By understanding the needs of consumers, modifying the product to meet those needs, and using advertising to convey the benefits of the product to different consumer segments, Dole was able to create a successful product.
Because the Fruit Bowls were new to the market, Dole's initial advertising objectives focused on ______
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its audience about the product.