Sorry if I’m about to make you hungry.
I’m concentrating purely on the cookies (some things will never change) and ignoring the bigger brand picture Girl Scouts frames in this post. And what a fantastic brand it is.
You won’t see Tim Tam presenting a case for having helped build communities or grow confidence in young girls. Its strongest cause is probably for adding width to thighs across Australia.
So I don’t know about you, but this sweet little clip just shifted my entire thinking around the humble biscuit. And is a fantastic case study on how ROI has been directly attributed to marketing via social media.
Girl Scouts America are teaching their padwans how to market wheaty goodness online with YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and e-Vites. And the kids are the marketers. Instead of delivering sales speeches to the old lady across the road, they’re utilising existing online social networks to share their products with friends and friends of friends.
Some argue this shift is tarnishing the Girl Scouts brand, a brand that has heritage in the way products have traditionally been distributed: scouts walking door to door around their local neighbourhoods. There’s a nostalgic element to it. Fondness.
But times are a-changing. The world we live in today is not the same as it was when Girl Scouts first boxed their biscuits. This now means that parents often tag along with their kids to sell the cookies, out of a valid concern for safety. But many mums no longer have time to run along after a cookie mission. As shocking as that sounds. Whether you think it’s lazy parenting or accept that it’s probably because women’s roles in the workforce and in the home are still changing, there’s less time to do things than there used to be.
Couple this with the ever-increasing amount of time people of all ages are spending with the internet, particularly on social networking sites, and it’s a pretty fair call to shift at least some of the business online. And it’s paying off.
Since launching its social media strategy at the beginning of the year, previously declining cookie sales have improved by 9%.
Not bad, is it?
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