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Marketing is all about getting people to want to buy a product. But what if you’re marketing a product that’s about to be pulled from the shelves (or, in this case, freezers)?
After announcing the end of the Choco Taco in July, Tracy Shepard-Rashkin, senior brand manager at Unilever, told us the Klondike team was surprised at how many people shared their love for the ice-cream treat online.
“I don’t think we ever could have anticipated the magnitude of the response,” Shepard-Rashkin said. “That’s really when we kind of jumped into planning mode, threw out our original plans to say goodbye to Choco Taco, and decided to do something bigger.”
Shepard-Rashkin said the team rounded up the remaining 912 Choco Tacos they had in their inventory at HQ and in their networks to run one final campaign. They asked what they should do with them on Twitter and received suggestions like hosting an eating contest or making a musical.
One particularly disgruntled fan told them to “shove them where the sun don’t shine,” which they actually did by handing out Choco Tacos in Bellingham, WA, which only sees about 157 sunny days per year.
“We wanted to choose suggestions that could be executed in a humorous, kind of over-the-top way,” Shepard-Rashkin said.
The other two executions involved giving out some of the 912 Choco Tacos at a baseball game in the 912 area code of Savannah, GA, and sending others to Death Valley for fans to find, a la the movie Rat Race. The final component of the campaign involved an online scavenger hunt where winners will ultimately get the last remaining tacos in the mail.
According to Shepard-Rashkin, Choco Taco hasn’t had a commercial in “decades, if ever,” and this was the first time she’s worked on an end-of-product campaign, making it a unique situation in many ways.
Since the campaign goal couldn’t possibly be to increase sales, Shepard-Rashkin said the team approached it as an opportunity to celebrate Choco Taco and boost a fun brand image for Klondike.
Asked if the engagement around the announcement and campaign caused the company to rethink discontinuing the Choco Taco, Shepard-Rashkin said it “definitely caught the attention of the folks who make the decisions in the factories.”
On its website, Klondike encourages people to sign a “petition” if they want to “see Choco Taco back in ice-cream trucks in the coming years,” though the petition in question appears to actually be a form that asks for details like a person’s email, zip code, and date of birth if they want to “sign up for the latest from Klondike.”
The Guardian speculated that “the discontinuation of the Choco Taco was just a publicity stunt to revive interest in a longstanding food item through engineered scarcity.” It’s a strategy that makes sense given the fervor for product returns and nostalgia marketing.
Shepard-Rashkin said the team is “certainly cranking on any potential avenue to bring [Choco Taco] back someday.”