It worked. As the California sugar industry grew in size and importance, Spreckels became a well-known name in branded sugar. In the late 1960's, after 50+ years on grocers' shelves, the Spreckels name disappeared, following the company's purchase by the American Sugar Co., which turned Spreckels into a manufacturer of private label sugar for the house brands of West Coast grocery chains such as Albertson's, Von's, Ralph's, and Safeway.
In 1987, Spreckels management organized a leveraged buyout and decided to revive the brand name on the West Coast. But, says Tom Fritz, marketing manager, Spreckels Sugar Co., the company knew that re-entering what is essentially a commodity market-one containing established and private label brands-would be difficult without some kind of value-added feature to differentiate the brand.
"It's very hard in any business to gain a foothold these days without spending a great deal of money, and we knew we had to offer some value to the consumer and to the trade to get them to accept our product."
To help with the reintroduction of the brand, Spreckels turned to the RAM Group, an Oakland-based marketing and sales organization whose subsidiary, Vista Marketing Research, supplied research services. Tom McCarty, managing director, Vista Marketing Research, says that the research focused on finding a way to make the product stand out in the minds of consumers.
"There were already price brands and established brands on the market. We knew that Spreckels couldn't just go on the shelf with the same product, it would get clobbered. The world doesn't need another bag of sugar. So the question when we started was, how can we make a better product?"
The answer to that question turned out to be packaging. A year of intense testing and research- including several rounds of one-on-one interviews in which consumers expressed satisfaction with sugar itself but complained about the problems of existing sugar packaging-produced a devilishly simple answer to consumer needs: the "Easy Pour & Seal" package, a milk carton-like container that pours, seals, and stores easily.
"Three-quarters of all the sugar sold is in five-pound bags, which break very easily, pour very poorly, and don't store well. So it was pretty obvious that packaging was our way to regain a foothold in the market," Fritz says.
One-on-ones
After the decision to reintroduce Spreckels was made, several one-on-one interviews were conducted with a cross-section of both light and heavy users of sugar, to delve into their attitudes and behavior towards sugar. The interviews included questions on the purchase process, home usage and storage, and impressions of various brands.
"We decided that there might be several opportunities for different product ideas relating to sugar, one of which was packaging. People told us that sugar is messy, it spills, and it gets knocked over," McCarty says.
Based on this information, several new product concepts were developed and then tested in a second round of one-on-ones. Respondents discussed the concepts and rated them, and this information was passed on to Spreckels management and to the staff of RAM Graphics, who constructed mock-ups of different packaging concepts designed to solve the problems uncovered in the research. These mock-ups were then subjected to in-home use tests, which eventually singled out the milk-carton style container as the most promising option.
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Critical information
Mock-ups of the milk carton container were made and tested to find the best ways to communicate critical product information to the consumer.
"It was important to test again because an in-home use test where people rave about the product is one thing, but getting people to buy it is another. We wanted to come up with designs that would communicate effectively and get people to try the product," McCarty says.
For example, because the Spreckels brand name was once well-established in California, Tom Fritz says, it is featured prominently, along with the tagline "Since 1898."
"Though 20 years had gone by since the brand was last available, we knew we had some equity left. We have a very old history in California and we wanted to communicate that to consumers so that they know there's a new kid on the block aside from brands like C&H and the private labels," Fritz says.
There were also other packaging considerations due to the container's unique design. Though it eventually unfolds into a gable topped container just like a milk carton, when the package is on store shelves, the top is folded down to allow for better stacking, so an illustration showing the "Easy Pour & Seal" feature was placed in the upper right corner to show the product in use.
"We needed to make sure that they understood that this wasn't some weird little box. It's something they're already comfortable using, they just had to know what it is. We wanted to communicate that this is a carton that you can pour from and seal afterwards," Fritz says.
The final test of the product was a series of projectable in-home use tests in various parts of the West Coast to measure performance under different weather and regional conditions. "We wanted to make sure that the product did provide all of the features people said they wanted and that it would work under home use over an extended period of time," McCarty says.
Survey cards
During test-marketing, survey cards were distributed to get reactions from consumers in the marketplace. McCarty says that doing a large-scale telephone study, for example, or mail panel was not possible because of time and budget constraints, so the returned survey cards served as a valuable, albeit non-projectable, source of information.
"You shouldn't trust a response card survey to give you actionable results, because you can't control the non-response bias, and you can't view the people that send back the survey cards as representative of the people who are buying your product. But we felt that as long as people could use the information responsibly, it could be a helpful tool."
Logical solution
Putting sugar in a milk carton is a logical solution to many problems that should have been introduced years ago. And judging by the tremendously positive response the new Spreckels container has earned in test markets, it seems many consumers agree. But Tom Fritz says that though it's a great idea, in the California sugar market at least, there was no need for it until Spreckels decided to re-enter the market.
"Necessity breeds a lot of things. For years here in California, the sugar market has been the private labels and C&H. There was no need for anyone to change anything because each of them had half of the market and life was cozy. The only way for us to get into the market was to offer the consumer something different. We simply set about through research to find out what consumers wanted versus what they were getting. And what we offer now is what they told us they wanted. It answers consumer concerns with issues of messiness, storage, and pourability."
Tom McCarty: "I'm sure it's something that other sugar manufacturers probably thought of before. But they probably looked at certain numbers and what their heavy users were saying, and decided to forget it. We went beyond that by spending more time with the consumer, the people who make the ultimate choice, really.
"People have said to us it seems like such a 'no-brainer,' like it's an easy thing to have done, but it wasn't. Because we each had, as I'm sure most companies do, our own pet ways of improving the package and there were all sorts of different considerations and trade-offs-environmental, social, price. We had to come up with something and consumer research was the main thing that drove that choice."
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One-on-ones offer in-depth look
The reintroduction of Spreckels sugar to the West Coast market was a research-intensive project that relied on one-on-ones, says Tom McCarty, managing director, Vista Marketing Research. He says that though one-on-ones are time consuming and labor-intensive, they pay off by providing an in-depth look into the consumer's thoughts and actions.
"if you are willing to take the time and energy to talk to 30 people for an hour each on a one-to-one basis, you get a complete understanding of the thought process of 30 consumers.
"As products and services become more and more specialized, you have to search for niches and go more and more in-depth to find the subtle differences in consumer perceptions. I think you can do that so much better in a one-on-one interview."
The interviews were usually conducted by McCarty and one person each from the RAM Group's Consulting Division and Spreckels. One of the strengths of the technique is that it allows the client and researcher to talk among themselves and raise additional questions, and then got an immediate response from the consumer, McCarty says.
Participation of the key people in the project is critical. "If the team members don't participate, it is not as valuable, because part of the value is the interchange between the team members, the research person, and the consumer. The one-on-one approach allows us to cut down on the time it takes to relay all the information obtained to the decision-makers.
"The team members get to know their consumers and can start to determine what is needed to successfully compete in the marketplace much better and faster than any other research technique we know of. For the Spreckels project, the team members included people from Spreckels marketing and package engineering, RAM Group marketing consultants, and designers from RAM Graphics. For other projects, the team has included copy writers, new product managers, product development managers, technical engineers, etc.
"There is a skill to making sure that the team members don't influence the outcome of the research. I, as the interview leader, must instruct the team members about at what points in the interview they may interact with the consumers and at what point they must remain quiet.
"The trade-off, and there are always trade-offs, is that some of the clients can't afford the time it takes to participate in the interviews. The team has to be willing to commit a little more time and energy to the one-on-one method because of the more active participation required compared to focus groups. Clients just can't pop in and watch one or two of the interviews because they tend to make assumptions based on only one or two people."
Also, this one-on-one interviewing process is harder on the researcher because so much more information is obtained and it is harder to objectively record the information and report it accurately.
"I try not to knock focus groups, because we do a lot of them and they do serve a purpose, but we feel that one-on-ones are the most effective way both to get a thorough understanding of the consumers as well as a great way to segue into quantitative research."
And, he says, respondents enjoy the process "You get some people that blush at first when they walk into a room and see three business people and no other respondents, but they warm up quickly. The respondents love the process--they get to ask questions and they enjoy the dialogue. They like the fact that we pay so much attention to what they have to say, They almost feel guilty when we pay them.”