Doritos is hoping to spread the love for its limited-time ketchup flavour by giving fans the chance to give a special arrangement of the chips as a gift this Valentine’s Day.
By visiting the Doritos Ketchup Roses websites, people in Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver can send a bouquet of “roses” crafted from Doritos Ketchup chips. If you live outside the delivery areas, the site also has step-by-step directions for you to make a similar bouquet yourself, as well as a $1 coupon for a bag of Doritos Ketchup (the roses require glue to stay together, so it’s best not to eat them. Unless you get your hands on the original brand-created bouquets, those ones are edible).
The campaign launched today and is being promoted through digital, social and influencers, as well as a new retro infomercial-style video that will be used as pre-roll. BBDO Toronto led creative on the campaign, with media by OMD.
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The campaign is looking to reach a mass audience, but is also positioning the roses as a “gift for guys” in a market filled with female-focused Valentine’s Day gifts.
“Canadians love it when we bring ketchup back, and we wanted to give them a way to express their love for the flavour, but we also saw a way to make Valentine’s Day special for guys while we were doing that,” says Matthew Webster, marketing manager for Doritos at PepsiCo Foods Canada.
The limited-time flavour will be available until May 14. Last year, PepsiCo Foods took a gamified approach to promoting Doritos Ketchup with “The Hold Out,” an app and contest that rewarded people who simply kept their finger on their smartphone for long periods of time. Ketchup had previously been used as part of the wider ongoing “Throwback” limited-time flavour promotion, but the response to that flavour in particular (seen as uniquely Canadian by many consumers) convinced the company to bring it back in 2015, and again this year.
Webster says that while those who do love Doritos Ketchup are fiercely loyal and quick to purchase the flavour when it’s released, the company is hoping to translate that love into trial among the rest of Canadians by giving “loyalists” the chance to share it with those who have yet to taste it.
“This year we were thinking about what’s better than holding on to your favourite flavour, and we came to sharing that flavour with someone you love,” Webster says, adding the hope is that creating a “physical” gift will still result in digital conversation. “Whenever Doritos as a brand gives folks to chance to talk about something new, they love to do so on social media and with friends. A gift has to be physical for it to be special, but we believe it’s the kind of thing that will spark a conversation online as well.”
