This newsletter was first published via email on the 29th May 2016. You can also sign up to receive Ice Cream Sundae by filling the form on the right-hand side column or here (since then the newsletter format changed from long to shorter form).
I was just browsing around for writing inspiration and checked some of my first blog posts from 2007. I’d started a series about my favourite brands back then, it seems like a good idea to bring the idea back in an updated version. This is the first of new Sundae series about my favourite brands, starting with a guilty pleasure I’m pretty much addicted to: Doritos.
The name itself comes the charming Spanish word “doradito” which translates as “a little golden” or “golden brown”.
You’ll also be glad to find there are persistent themes in my interests given the product was originally created and sold at the Casa de Fritos in Disneyland in California. I am of course referring to the previous Sundae newsletters I wrote about theme parks and roller coasters. Apparently some day in 1964 they found themselves with surplus tortilla, decided to cut them up in triangles and fry them like the traditional Totopo Mexican chips. They added some dry powder seasoning and they became very popular.
They were quickly overwhelmed by the amount of people who wanted the addictive triangles and a couple of years later Doritos was born, the first tortilla chip brand to be launched nationwide in the United States. Now with a global 39% market share, Doritos is the largest tortilla chip brand in the world.
I’m a complete sucker for crisps (or chips, depending where you’re reading this), particularly corn crisps and these little triangles come first on my list. They crunch and taste amazing. It’s also a family thing: I have 3 siblings and whenever we meet, you can sure there’ll be a bag of them close by.
Of course you may be reading this and thinking they’re disgusting cesspools of fat and chemicals, and you may be right. Then again, put one in your mouth and you might reconsider. Maybe chemicals like flavor and conservation agents aren’t all that bad. Doritos got a lot of flack over the years for the potentially artificial nature of their ingredients. Years ago the satirical news website The Onion published a fun article about Doritos celebrating their “One Millionth Ingredient”.
From a product innovation, branding and communications perspective Doritos is consistently one of the most interesting brands out there.
They’ve been making interesting efforts for a long time, for example you might remember the legendary product placement scene in Wayne’s World includes Nacho cheese flavoured Doritos. I used to know every single line of dialogue of the whole movie when I was a teenager, if ever you were wondering what I was doing with my time back then, a few hours involved watching and re-watching Wayne’s World.
Doritos have been associated with the Super Bowl for a long time, the most watched TV event in the US and most expensive and anticipated from an advertising perspective. Recently the average cost to air a 30 second ad during the Super Bowl went from $4 million the past few years to $4.5 million.
I believe it was in 2006 they started the “Crash the Super Bowl” marketing campaign, as far as I know one of the first successful examples of crowd sourcing and getting fans involved in the creative concepts and videos advertising Doritos. It was organised as a competition, anyone could submit video adverts and the winners would be aired during the Super Bowl. Given how successful it became they reiterated the campaign several times, and Doritos ads are now among the most anticipated during the Super Bowl. They’re often weird, funny and quirky.
The first winner “Live The Flavour” aired during the Super Bowl in 2007, the first ever consumer created TV ad to appear during the popular sporting event and raked the fourth best ad according to the USA Today Ad Meter Poll. Subsequent research showed Doritos saw a 12% increase in sales in the month following the ad and close to one million people visited the website where they could see all the Doritos from other competition finalists. They were expecting about 200 competition entries for the first year and received over 1,100.
In a good example of demonstrating it’s not worth changing a winning team – a French saying: “On ne change pas une équipe qui gagne” – the following year Doritos attempted to change the successful formula to offer musicians to “Crash the Super Bowl” but that ended up nowhere near as popular as the previous year so they brought the ads back and have been doing it very ever since.
Among my favourite finalist videos over the years two deserve particular mentions and are worth checking out: Goat 4 Sale and Finger Cleaner.
Doritos are known for a wide variety of flavours they test for different markets around the world and adapt their flavourings to better suit tastes in various parts of the world. They brilliantly leverage the product for promotion and advertising purposes as well. I believe that started with the X-13D Flavour Experiment campaign. As per their current brand tagline “For the Bold” it takes being bold to decide it would be a great idea to remove your branding and packaging to release a mystery flavour and open it as a competition for consumers to guess what the flavour is. The bag of chips was just plain black with “X-13D” in large white print on the packaging. Youtube and Facebook were just rising in popularity at the time and thousands of people posted videos of their tasting the mystery chips, which turned out to be cheeseburger flavoured.
People love Doritos and there are hundreds of thousands of videos on Youtube taste testing and reviewing all sorts from the brand, such as testing these Japanese Clam Chowder flavoured Doritos.
Doritos regularly plays around with flavours, Roulette is one of the latest from a couple of years ago and that they now bring back as a seasonal special flavour (I’ve seen it in shops in London last week). It’s a bag of Nacho Cheese chips with the added twist that one chip in every handful is a really hot chilli flavoured one. The ad here with furries for some reason.
Dorito Loco Taco is hailed as one of the most successful products in fast food history.
I haven’t tried them unfortunately, though I’m afraid I might be as disappointed as every time I try a special large chain fast food item. I never find them as exciting as the ad claims. These speciality items are the result of a partnership between Doritos and fast food chain Taco Bell. It’s basically a taco in a Dorito shell including the original branding and flavouring. One of the stories in an article I read and linked to mentions someone who drove over 900 miles to get their hands on one of those when they had just launched in a few restaurants in California to test the market. A couple of years ago they were already selling over a million of these every day, over a $1 billion worth of revenue in sales in 2014.
In 2013 Doritos updated their logo, packaging design and adopted their first global campaign line and theme to be consistent across all countries where the tortilla chips are sold: For The Bold. Before the 25 different packaging designs existed around the world. The brand believed in today’s connected world where everyone accesses pretty much the same social media platforms it didn’t make sense to try and modify the product for different countries.
They are activating the campaign with a yearlong effort to find people ready to beat 50 different world records, all involved Doritos chips in some way. Examples provided are “Tallest house of cards made with Doritos” or “Farthest distance of Dorito chip tossed into mouth”.
Of course Doritos are to be consumed with moderation. I’m feeling a little peckish after writing about all this. I think I may well have to walk down to the shop later today and get myself a little bag of Doritos.
If you read last week’s edition about classic video games, I mentioned Game Camp London. Now I’ve published my first live audience recording for my audio podcast, it was a fun conversation. It’s here if you’d like to check it out.
If any of your friends are Doritos lovers too, please forward this Sundae over to them, they might enjoy reading more about their marketing and branding efforts.
Enjoy the rest of your weekend!
All the best,
Willem
