5 of the Best Product Launches in Retail to Remember

Popeyes’ chicken sandwich

Popeyes’ chicken sandwich

 

By Tricia McKinnon

What is the best way to launch a new product or service? It’s not as easy as it seems. Since consumers are inundated with hundreds of ads every day it can take a unique approach to standout. Or in the case of Popeyes a little bit of serendipity goes a long way. Most focus on the buzz generated by the now famous #chickensandwichwars but the truth is without a great product or a seemingly innocuous tweet from a rival Popeyes’ launch of its chicken sandwich would not have been nearly as memorable or as successful. 

Oatly is another interesting case. The popular oat milk brand has taken off in the United States over the past few years but it is unlikely it would have if it hadn’t done painstaking research to identify the real influencers of its beverages. Not the ones now found on YouTube but the baristas from high end coffee shops Oatly used as a way of introducing its product to American consumers. 

If you are interested in how some of the best brands launch new products consider these success stories.

1. Popeyes

It was the summer of 2019 and there was a frenzy. No the world wasn’t coming to an end…unless you couldn’t get your hands on Popeyes’ new chicken sandwich. On August 12, 2019 Popeyes launched a new chicken sandwich. It has pickles, a buttery bun and chicken coated in buttermilk. To many it’s simply…delicious.

It is so good people took notice including employees of the biggest chicken chain by sales in the United States, Chick-fil-A. On August 19, 2019 Chick-fil-A tweeted this in response to the launch of Popeyes’ new chicken sandwich: “Bun + Chicken + Pickles = all the ❤️ for the original to more than one million of Chick-fil-A’s followers. At the time Popeyes had a little over 100,000 followers on Twitter. The hope was that Chick-fil-A would remind its following that it still had the best chicken sandwich in town.

Shortly after Chick-fil-A’s tweet, Popeyes responded with a tweet of its own: “y’all good?” A few words and the #chickensandwichwars began with many fast food chains including Wendy’s and Shake Shack jumping into the fray online, not to mention thousands of Twitter users, trash talking about who’s chicken sandwich was better . The explosion in online activity around Popeyes’ chicken sandwich was so great it was equivalent to millions and millions of dollars in equivalent advertising dollars. 

The online sparring also had the affect of actually driving consumers with a serious case of FOMO to try Popeyes’ new chicken sandwich. They wanted to know, is it worth the hype? Apparently it was and within nearly two weeks after launch Popeyes ran out of its famous chicken sandwich and it was unavailable for more than a month.

One of the keys to the success of this launch was that Popeyes had a team ready to take immediate action on social media in the event anything interesting happened. And the very event they prepared for happened. The team included Popeyes’ marketing, legal, communications as well as social media staff from Popeyes’ agency GSD&M. The team had already set up a “code orange chat” on What’s App where they could quickly discuss any interesting social media activity. The moment they prepared for happened when Chick-fil-A tweeted about their launch. Then Popeyes’ team spent 15 minutes brainstorming how to respond before tweeting: “y’all good?” 

If Popeyes didn’t have the foresight to ensure it was ready to respond the chicken sandwich wars likely would have never happened. You can almost imagine what would have happened in a company that wasn’t as prepared. A series of approvals and bureaucracy would have caused the moment to slip away. “The reason it happened so quickly is that we had established trust with the client in the beginning of the year,” says Angela Brown, social strategist at GSD&M “A lot of other clients would have been too scared to act.”

While Popeyes’ twitter savvy has been analyzed endlessly the reality is that without a good product Popeyes’ chicken sandwich would never have become a phenomenon. Popeyes did the work it takes to be a success. It noticed several years before the launch of its sandwich that more and more consumers were eating boneless chicken. It saw this trend at Popeyes and at Burger King which is also owned by Restaurant Brands, Popeyes’ parent company. Seeing these trends Popeyes decided to spend two years creating a new chicken sandwich.

If you have ever tried Popeyes’ chicken sandwich you know that it lives up to the hype. It is so good it caught the attention of the market leader, Chick-fil-A. Make no mistake Chick-fil-A knew how good it was or it wouldn’t have bothered tweeting in the first place. It saw Popeyes as a threat and it responded. 

Nothing travels faster on social media than hate and if people hated the sandwich sales would have fizzled quickly. Quality matters. While many are in pursuit of likes and followers a better strategy is to focus on quality and innovation. In the fourth quarter of 2019, several months after the launch of the chicken sandwich Popeyes’ sales were up 42% showing it wasn’t just a savvy tweet that brought the company success but a superior product that started with social media hype but eventually was led by word of mouth from people who tried the sandwich and realized it was really good and then told their friends about it. Popeyes has called the launch of its chicken sandwich the biggest launch in its 30 year history.

Maybe the real lesson of the #chickensandwichwars is to be careful about how you respond to competitive threats. If Chick-fil-A had ignored the launch of Popeyes’ sandwich it is unlikely it would have become a phenomenon. It takes a lot of confidence and courage not to be reactive and to trust in what you have. How often does Apple talk about Samsung? I am sure Chick-fil-A wishes it wasn’t so insecure and instead resisted the temptation to tweet about its competitor.

2. Oatly

Imagine running a business that’s over 20 years old. You have had success in your home market and now it’s time to expand into a new market, the United States. The first question many brands facing this opportunity will ask is how are we going to market our product in America? Do we need to set up a marketing arm overseas? Do we need a Chief Marketing Officer? 

If you are Oatly you go in a completely different direction. When Oatly entered the United States market in 2016 it didn’t have a Marketing department much less a CMO. "We don't follow the traditional playbook, we don't even have a traditional marketing department," said John Schoolcraft, Oatly US's creative director. "Our secret sauce is that we're inconsistently consistent." 

Oatly’s aversion to doing what everyone else is doing didn’t stop there. Instead of flooding the market with Instagram and Facebook ads Oatly employed an entirely different approach. Oatly conducted painstaking research to identify a set of coffee shops in the United States that could serve as informal brand ambassadors for its product. 

Oatly didn’t choose any coffee shops but high end shops that roast their own beans and are local favourites. The process took several years and resulted in Oatly selecting ten coffee shops in major cities in the United States. “If you’re going to get people to try oat milk for the first time, you want to make sure that first trial is the best possible situation,” says Schoolcraft. 

After selecting the ten coffee shops Oatly sent a sales rep to make a quick sales pitch at each location and left the baristas with free samples of Oatly. At first the baristas resisted but who doesn’t like trying something that’s free (think free samples at Costco). The strategy worked and Oatly’s product spread through coffee shops across the United States. By the end of Oatly’s first year in America its oat milk was in 1,000 coffee shops across the United States. "They developed a really strong alignment with baristas, roasters and coffee shop owners — the ultimate influencers for devotees of specialty coffee," said Lori Bartle, president of ad agency MeringCarson. "That's serious word-of-mouth, as these are the people who are more likely to recommend it not as a trend but as a lifestyle choice."

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3. Harry’s  

There is great power in having someone personally refer a new and exciting product to a friend. If you think about many of the purchases you have made over the past year, the movies you watched or the books you read or the restaurants you ate at you will see that your actions are often a reflection of the tastes of those around you. 

You may be familiar with Harry’s the brand that started out selling razors, shaving cream and other grooming products to consumers online. After only seven short years in 2019 Harry’s was valued at $1.37 billion. Critical to successfully launching the brand was a word of mouth campaign. The campaign resulted in Harry’s getting close to 100,000 email sign ups in the week before its eCommerce website went live. In an excerpt from Tim Ferriss’ blog Jeff Raider, co-founder and co-CEO of Harry’s tells the story of how they got so many signups:

“The idea for our campaign was built around our belief that the most powerful and effective way to be introduced to our new company was through a credible referral. Thus, we focused on building a campaign that helped people to spread the word to their friends.”

“The fundamental mechanic of our campaign was a game: complete the challenge of referring friends and earn prizes. It seems pretty straightforward—and it is—but we think that what those prizes are, and how they are doled out, is critical to getting people excited play. Not all reward structures are created equal. Here are a few things what worked for us.”

“First, we tried to make our rewards tangible: free Harry’s product. On the page, we very clearly emphasized, ‘Invite Friends and Earn Product.’ It was the one message on the page where we did away with mystery and left nothing up to interpretation. We didn’t want there to be any doubt about what people might receive.”

“To earn the first tier prize—a free shave cream—you had to make only five successful referrals. The next tier was only five further referrals. If you signed up ten friends, you earned a free razor.” “The jump between tier two and tier three was more significant but still not overwhelming: 25 referrals and you’d receive a shave set with our more premium handle, The Winston. Finally, even the grand prize was within reach: a year of free shaving for those who referred 50 friends.”

“We started there, with our own friends. We had our team of 12 employees seed the campaign to their friends.”  “When all was said and done, we had collected by our estimation over 85K valid email addresses (and over 100K emails in total) in the span of seven days.”

This example demonstrates the power even a small team of people has to get the word out. Imagine the amount of money it would have taken to gain a similar amount of email signups via Facebook ads. The people you know are more valuable than you think.

4. Adidas 

Adidas, more than almost any brand, understands how vital scarcity is to building and sustaining a brand. When Kanye West launched the Yeezy Boost 350 sneaker with Adidas he did so with a limited release drop. It is estimated that for many of West’s limited release drops only tens of thousands of shoes are available for sale which then sell out almost immediately. Author Robert Cialdini has written extensively about the scarcity principle. His teachings can be boiled down to the simple fact that: “people want more of those things they can have less of.”  

Even Adidas CEO Kasper Rørsted confirmed what the brand’s secret sauce is when he said: “as we’re moving new Yeezy products into the market, we will do what we’ve done also in the past: create scarcity around the new products we are launching, make sure we have the hype, and, over a given period of time of course, drive volume into that market.”

West’s line with Adidas has been a hit and was expected to generate more than $1.3 billion in sales in 2019.

5. Warby Parker

Without a large marketing budget at their disposal Warby Parker leveraged the platform of established brands in order to build its own. It did this by relying on PR to generate an audience when its eCommerce website first launched. Since Warby Parker considers itself a fashion brand it decided it would be best to be featured in the best women’s and the best men’s fashion publications to generate buzz about its business. 

To achieve this goal it hired a PR company which successfully pitched profiling Warby Parker in GQ and Vogue. Both magazines ran stories on the brand on February 15, 2010 the day Warby Parker’s website launched. Based on the buzz generated from both of those publications, Warby Parker’s website ended up crashing after launch. Warby Parker was able to meet its first year sales target within three weeks and within four weeks it sold out of its top 15 most popular styles leading to a 20,000 person waiting list for its eye glasses. 

Tricia McKinnonStrategy & GrowthComment