In the article For Farmville Players, a Crop From a Real Organic Farm, Elizabeth Olsen discusses the Facebook game Farmville's popularity and their first branded in-game crop integration to offer users something that will benefit them online and offline.
What is Farmville? According to Wikipedia, Farmville is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on the Apple iPhone. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops and trees, and raising livestock. Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans in May 2010. The total FarmVille users are over 20% of the users of Facebook. Users of Farmville can play for free, but they also can spend real money to buy virtual goods that enable them to expand their farms.
The game's creator, Zynga Game Network, is now joining FarmVille's players to retailers and the organic food company Cascadian Farm. Cascadian Farm is a subsidiary of General Mills. With this partnership, Farmville for the first time will offer its players a specific food brand. According to the article, the objective is for FarmVille users to learn about organic farming and green living, and at the same time earn points to grow fruits and vegetables on their virtual farms. For Cascadian Farm, their hopes are to expand their market and make their brand better known through Farmville's audience.
This is however not the first virtual partnership Farmville has made with a General Mills brand. In May of 2010, Green Giant Fresh (a subsidiary of General Mills) placed a coded sticker on their fresh products sold at Target stores across the country. These stickers were redeemable on their website TheGiant.com for 5 free units of Farmville cash. These units are the currency that Farmville players use to expand their crops and farms. This proved to be a huge marketing success for the food producer. "In five weeks, $100,000 work of the units were redeemed by online costumers, who cashed in an average of two coupons each" said Mishalin Modena, marketing manager of Green Giant Fresh. Target will not be the only store as they are looking to also expand the promotion to other stores such as WalMart. All this in the hopes of increasing costumer loyalty to their products.
The approach taken by Cascadian Farm with their partnership with Zynga will be different. Through research it was determined that Farmville's are 60% women and most players are between the ages of 20 to 40. They play the game for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. Through embedding their brand into the game, they are offering beginners a cop that can be harvested faster and bring a bigger cash return than other crops. This promotion will only last through July 26th. Since Farmville adds new content every other day and users play two to four times per week, Cascadian Farm does not want to overextend their stay.
For Zygna, and specifically with Farmville, this is their newborn days in using advertising with their game applications. In June they also implemented a partnership with the convenience store powerhouse 7-Eleven. This allowed Facebook game players shopping within their stores to redeem codes found on product for virtual items on Farmville and two other Zygna games sites.
On the other side, for Cascadian Farm already has already been utilizing the social networking world as a venue to advertise and grow their brand through their own Facebook and Twitter pages and by posting YouTube videos. Through tuning into the Farmville application, which has 60 million people play a month, it is large scale venue that they lacked before. Prior to this new campaign, the company relied on smaller scale advertising plans through print ads in magazines and handing out free sample at community events. They realized that tapping into the social media was a way to gain the attention of a large scale market. They will be analyzing the results of the Farmville campaign by measuring Cascadian's Web activity and also phone calls to the company's 800 number and hits on its blog (http://www.cascadianfarm.com/).
Overall, Cascadian Farm's goal by allying with Farmville will familiarize more people with organic foods and why they are different. It has been difficult since organic food is set at premium pricing, but sales did grow more than 5 percent last year. Organic and whole food companies such as Cascadian are recognizing the importance of social media to get awareness out in the market on not only their product line but the benefits of eating organic and whole foods.
What is Farmville? According to Wikipedia, Farmville is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on the Apple iPhone. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops and trees, and raising livestock. Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook, with over 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans in May 2010. The total FarmVille users are over 20% of the users of Facebook. Users of Farmville can play for free, but they also can spend real money to buy virtual goods that enable them to expand their farms.
The game's creator, Zynga Game Network, is now joining FarmVille's players to retailers and the organic food company Cascadian Farm. Cascadian Farm is a subsidiary of General Mills. With this partnership, Farmville for the first time will offer its players a specific food brand. According to the article, the objective is for FarmVille users to learn about organic farming and green living, and at the same time earn points to grow fruits and vegetables on their virtual farms. For Cascadian Farm, their hopes are to expand their market and make their brand better known through Farmville's audience.
This is however not the first virtual partnership Farmville has made with a General Mills brand. In May of 2010, Green Giant Fresh (a subsidiary of General Mills) placed a coded sticker on their fresh products sold at Target stores across the country. These stickers were redeemable on their website TheGiant.com for 5 free units of Farmville cash. These units are the currency that Farmville players use to expand their crops and farms. This proved to be a huge marketing success for the food producer. "In five weeks, $100,000 work of the units were redeemed by online costumers, who cashed in an average of two coupons each" said Mishalin Modena, marketing manager of Green Giant Fresh. Target will not be the only store as they are looking to also expand the promotion to other stores such as WalMart. All this in the hopes of increasing costumer loyalty to their products.
The approach taken by Cascadian Farm with their partnership with Zynga will be different. Through research it was determined that Farmville's are 60% women and most players are between the ages of 20 to 40. They play the game for 10 to 15 minutes at a time. Through embedding their brand into the game, they are offering beginners a cop that can be harvested faster and bring a bigger cash return than other crops. This promotion will only last through July 26th. Since Farmville adds new content every other day and users play two to four times per week, Cascadian Farm does not want to overextend their stay.
For Zygna, and specifically with Farmville, this is their newborn days in using advertising with their game applications. In June they also implemented a partnership with the convenience store powerhouse 7-Eleven. This allowed Facebook game players shopping within their stores to redeem codes found on product for virtual items on Farmville and two other Zygna games sites.
On the other side, for Cascadian Farm already has already been utilizing the social networking world as a venue to advertise and grow their brand through their own Facebook and Twitter pages and by posting YouTube videos. Through tuning into the Farmville application, which has 60 million people play a month, it is large scale venue that they lacked before. Prior to this new campaign, the company relied on smaller scale advertising plans through print ads in magazines and handing out free sample at community events. They realized that tapping into the social media was a way to gain the attention of a large scale market. They will be analyzing the results of the Farmville campaign by measuring Cascadian's Web activity and also phone calls to the company's 800 number and hits on its blog (http://www.cascadianfarm.com/).
Overall, Cascadian Farm's goal by allying with Farmville will familiarize more people with organic foods and why they are different. It has been difficult since organic food is set at premium pricing, but sales did grow more than 5 percent last year. Organic and whole food companies such as Cascadian are recognizing the importance of social media to get awareness out in the market on not only their product line but the benefits of eating organic and whole foods.
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