GoGo Squeez is break dancing its way to a new brand image.
The snack brand, best known for its squeezable applesauce pouches, has largely come to be associated with babies or toddlers, but its latest product and marketing push is meant to tap into a slightly older, more active audience.
To help grow the brand beyond its original target demo—households with kids ages six to 12—GoGo Squeez designed a new fruit blend with electrolytes that’s meant to be used as a sports snack, and to promote it, the brand has partnered with Logan “Logistx” Edra, who’s competing in the first-ever Olympic breaking event—the competitive form of break dancing.
“We’re on a journey to age up our brand,” CMO Mark Anthony Edmonson told Marketing Brew. “We are now seeing young adults and teens recognizing that this is something that they missed out on,” he later added. “They forgot about us, and now they’re returning back to the brand.”
Break it down
The idea to associate with sports came about after Edmonson’s team noticed that consumers were using the product while they were getting active, like bringing it on hikes or bike rides. Beyond that, some sports nutritionists the brand was working with mentioned recommending it to clients, and the team spotted it on the sidelines of some professional sports games, he said.
Breaking is certainly one of the lesser-known Olympic sports, but that’s one of the reasons GoGo Squeez was drawn to it, according to Edmonson. In addition, breaking is popular among the brand’s new target audience of teens and young adults, he said.
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“We’ve always been an innovative brand,” he said. “We wanted to partner with a sport that was the first, and something that could actually be big.”
GoGo Squeez signed Edra because she’s already made waves in breaking: She started breaking when she was seven, and now has multiple world championships under her belt, including the 2021 Red Bull BC One World Final. Even better, she was also already a GoGo Squeez consumer, Edmonson added.
While GoGo Squeez isn’t an official Olympic partner, there’s no question that the event helps bring brand interest to niche sports when they’re in the limelight every four years.
Social sauce
GoGo Squeez’s work with Edra is part of its “Fun-damentals” campaign promoting the new sports pouch. It includes a video ad running on social set to an original song created for the brand by Gen Z rapper and actor Connor Price, which shows young adults participating in sports like basketball, skateboarding, and pickleball.
The deal with Edra has already generated social content for platforms like YouTube and TikTok, where breaking videos are gaining some traction among young audiences, Edmonson said. GoGo Squeez is also leveraging Snapchat filters as part of the campaign.
“Social is where our consumer is today,” he said. “We believe that that’s where we’ll have the highest engagement amongst our target audience, which is the teens and young adults. In addition to that, we know how social is infectious. It spreads like wildfire, so we were hoping that…will truly allow us to not only tell our brand story, but also share [Edra’s] story as well.”