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KERN BUSINESS JOURNAL
Februar y/March 2014
Citrus marketing war
Paramount goes head-to-head with its own success
Dianne Hardisty / Kern Business Journal
Fruit is sorted at the Paramount Citrus packing house in Delano. By John Cox
I
t’s a tall order even for the branding geniuses who made Cuties a household name: top their own phenomenal success. Delano-based Paramount Citrus last fall kicked off a five-year, $100 million marketing campaign to persuade consumers to switch from Cuties to “Halos” -- as in, “pure goodness,” according to the new advertising tagline. The catch: There’s no physical difference between the two products. Grown mostly in the Central Valley, they’re a type of mandarin known as clementines or, depending on the time of year, murcotts. There is, however, a very real financial distinction. Paramount’s Los Angeles parent company, Roll Global, no longer has rights to the Cuties name -- even though its in-house marketing agency did the product branding work that industry people credit with changing the way produce is marketed. Paramount agreed to give up the Cuties brand this past spring as part of a corporate divorce from Pasadena-based Sun Pacific Marketing Cooperative Inc., which now owns exclusive rights to the product name. Both companies kept about 13,000 mandarin acres each in Kern and other parts of the southern Valley. Halos hit store shelves across the country in November. Some retailers sell them alongside Cuties -- and five-pound bags of each sell for the same $6.99. Paramount’s strategy is not only to recapture the children’s market Cuties has come to be associated with, but also expand it to everyone else, said Paramount Citrus’ vice president of sales and marketing, Scott Owens. “It’s appealing to a much broader audience,” he said. With that in mind, Paramount has produced three 30-second commercials for broadcast on cable and network television. The company plans to reinforce its message with a social media campaign, a smartphone game app for kids and merchandise give-
Dianne Hardisty / Kern Business Journal
A Paramount Citrus worker sorts fruit at the company’s packing house in Delano.
aways. The TV commercials focus on children who go from nice to ornery when adults try to take one of their Halos. “They’re angels, unless you mess with their Halos!” reads a company news release on the campaign. Industry expectations are high. Roll Global, after all, is the company behind POM Wonderful, which introduced Americans to pomegranates, a fruit many people east of the West Coast had never even heard of. Roll also owns Wonderful Pistachios, whose domestic sales have been supported by a series of hip, celebrity-laden TV ads. Then there’s the campaign’s price tag. Wisconsin produce marketing executive Melinda Goodman said $100 million may be the most money ever set aside for a produce marketing campaign. “I think it’s a number we’ve never seen before,” she said. The Halos campaign represents a relatively new idea in produce marketing, she said. In years past, fruit was fruit. Growers and grocers did little or nothing to distinguish one brand from another. Paramount’s work with Cuties helped change that, she said. “They’ve done a great job of creating brands” that are relevant in popular culture, she said. At the same time, conventional wisdom holds that even the best produce branding can achieve no more than 40 percent to 50 percent marketshare, she said. What Paramount has going for it is consumer demand for mandarins already established by Cuties, said Goodman, managing director of FullTilt Marketing, which also has offices in Florida and Minnesota. “Now all they have to do is get consumers to recognize that (Halos) brand,” she said. If it succeeds, Paramount has a shot at stealing marketshare from Sun Pacific, said Julie Lucido, a marketing professional at Fresno-based Marketing Plus. John Cox is a Bakersfield Californian staff writer. A longer version of this article appeared in The Californian in November 2013.