Sugarshots: The Company's POV

 

Useful links:

Recap of past tests 

Metrics overview 
View entire campaign 

You don't know what you don't know.

At Sugarshots, this has been one of our guiding principles from day one. It's a call to action that challenges you to find out. And at the same time humbles you to stay hungry.

So when Doug Schumacher approached us about participating in a case study on open source marketing, we were all for it. Our business happens to be at a point where we've proven the concept's viability in the marketplace and we're looking to rethink our brand, our packaging and our marketing before we aggressively pursue market share. So we saw this as a great opportunity.

A little history.

When we started Sugarshots over four years ago, it literally did happen over lunch. Jennifer Parke and I (a creative team at the time) had ordered iced tea, and while we waited for our burgers we started chiding one another over our futile choice of sweeteners -- artificially effective (me), or naturally useless (her).

And then it happened.

Jennifer looked over her shoulder, from side-to-side and then she leaned in close and brought out the little light she'd been hiding for God knows how many years,

"I've always thought someone should come out with liquid sugar."

The hair on my neck, arms, legs and back stood up! A big idea had entered the room and everything else in my brain scrambled for the corners. It sounds melodramatic, but how often does a single sentence change your life? ("I'm pregnant," doesn't count.)

Over the next few months we obsessively researched and brainstormed only to arrive at two conclusions. 

1. Liquid sugar as a retail / foodservice product didn't exist.
2. We needed help. Lots of help.

Specifically, we knew we needed a business mastermind and a product visionary. Jennifer and I were pretty well networked, so we expected to find someone. But we didn't expect the top two people on our list (Rob Bruce and Scott Waltz) to be as blown away as I was and to commit to the project on the spot -- for sweat equity. Big ideas easily inspire.

But despite our collective years in advertising, marketing, product design and business development, and regardless of the billions of dollars we had played large parts in enabling, we realized we knew nothing about the food industry when the crush of questions fell upon us:

Does someone already make liquid sugar? Why doesn't anyone make liquid sugar? Can we make liquid sugar? What would we call it? How much would it cost? Who would bottle it? Where do we store it? What sizes should we offer? Where do you buy 40,000 lbs of sugar? What's our recipe? Would people buy it? Would people serve it? How would we serve it? Do we sell it direct? To retailers? To foodservice? Should we raise money? How much?

Et cetera.

Now, for those of us who have had the manic pleasure of being infected with entrepreneurial spirit, you know that every answer is merely the steppingstone to the next question. And it's not until you accept this eternal state of not knowing, that you become at peace with the process of pursuing a big idea.

From a marketing and product development perspective, we've always recognized measured failures as the quickest means to arrive at a successful execution -- a useful approach when you're feeling your way through a new product category like liquid sugar.

We're not Zen marketers. But we've been forced to arrive at some very Zen-like conclusions about marketing.

1. You don't know what you don't know
2. Open minds attract success
3. Big ideas are a journey
4. Failure can be your greatest success

All of this plays well into the "open source" concept, which, I would argue, is a philosophy to be applied to all aspects of a business, not just to marketing. It keeps a business eager to learn more about itself through its customers.

Everyone here at Sugarshots has been pleasantly surprised by the results of the case study so far. But the one that gave all of us the big "AH-HA" moment was the conclusion on messaging -- Liquid Sugar Tastes Better.

We didn't think it could be that simple.

We were much more in the realm of functional benefit communications. But that's because we've been on the front lines of generating awareness and selling the product to one person, one coffee shop and one grocery store at a time, where the most common first question is, "Huh?"

So now we've had the pleasure of being knocked out of that rut by this case study.

And we're already working to apply what we've learned. "Liquid sugar tastes better at home too" is in our new point of sample promo for grocery stores that sample at their coffee bar and sell our retail products.

This whole experiment has had profound impact on us. There are obvious benefits, like quintupling our site traffic and doubling our web sales. But the real value to us as owners and marketers has been learning to use the open source approach to problem solving.

For instance, open source packaging design? We're thinking about it. Or, if we were to consider an investment in a cutting-edge technology like "hot spotting" on streaming video, at least we could make that leap knowing that the cornerstones of what that message would be are based on real prospect preferences.

There has been a lot of focus on the use of open source as a way to launch a new product. And I think that's great and an obvious application. But the real value is to companies and products that want to reinvent themselves organically but are too entrenched to take a fresh look at themselves.

In conclusion, we would especially like to thank:

Doug Schumacher at Basement-inc.com for thinking of us. He has really brought a lot of clarity to our business through this case study, and we really appreciate it. By taking the time to understand where we came from and where we want to go, he has helped us evolve.

Dave Pronge at Shadomedia takes care of our site and he's done an amazing job of accommodating everyone's requests to get under the hood on our site.

Offermatica has completely changed the way we think of our site and our ability to drive behavior from the start. We can't wait to see where this takes us.

24/7 Media. Let's just say that the money we will spend online will be extremely well spent thanks to your approach.

Atlas couldn't have been easier to implement and I've become hopelessly addicted to their tools.

Think Metrics for providing the site analytics.

And iMedia Connection. Thank you for sponsoring this case study. You embody the open source state of mind, and because of that desire to understand, the industry benefits.

I can't wait to see where we end up. You don't know what you don't know, right? Just keep an open-source state of mind.

Matt Schow is co-founder of Sugarshots.