Social media and yogurt

The welcome news is that the top five yogurt companies in the UK have banded together to form the Yogurt Council, a body where information about this long-favourite product is disseminated to the public, and hopefully growth will follow. It is a good plan and one that other sectors of the dairy industry – cheese, milk and so forth – have already implemented with some success. Milk, for example, has appeared to halt the precipitous decline in its fortunes through extensive use of celebrities and sports personalities in the UK and North America, for campaigns such as “make mine Milk” and the milk moustache. Cheese continues to garner interest through clever public relations bids such as developing a cheese national anthem and getting people to send in recipes for cheese on toast.

The really welcome news is that nowadays it doesn’t require heaps of money, either. Just time and some dedication to the subject. Facebook, Twitter, websites and other social media methods often yield results. My personal favourite was Tine’s drive to increase its chocolate milk consumption through the use of getting visitors to the site to vote for the favourite new flavours, and even though the resulting flavours didn’t sell well, the original chocolate milk product saw an upswing in sales. Clever stuff and it works. The downside, as the company reported, was that attention had to be paid constantly to the website and other social media sites. It’s always something.