Mac N' Cheese For Breakfast, Anyone?
Picture this: it’s the 1930s and the Great Depression is in full swing. In a time when many couldn’t afford high-protein food like meat and milk, Kraft decided to start selling solo packets of cheese powder.
That’s it. Just a packet of powdered cheese for a few pennies. They thought it would be a huge hit. But…it totally bombed.
One sales rep, trying to unload his supply of the product, threw these cheese packets into boxes of macaroni, marketed it to grocers as "Kraft Dinner"— and and quickly sold out his supply. Voila, the beloved box of Kraft Mac N’ Cheese® was born.
By pairing these two products together, Kraft created something new and valuable-- and stumbled onto a major success.
-Speaking of Kraft, have you noticed they recently started advertising their mac n' cheese as a breakfast food? I guess with everyone stuck at home with anxiety during a pandemic, they decided to give us permission to indulge in comfort food all day. It's working too, because their mac n' cheese is flying off the shelves (and their tradition of successful re-packaging continues).
Kraft isn’t the only company who can reframe something into a breakfast food. There’s the coffee shop/bakery that had a lot of customers in the morning, looking for their first cup o’ Joe. They would sometimes sell cookies in the afternoon, but not enough. So they did a tiny shift: they created these big, delicious cookies, put some extra oatmeal and nuts in the recipe, called them “Breakfast Cookies,” and suddenly, their cookie sales doubled (and now everyone can convince themselves cookies are healthy- yay!).
So where am I going with this, besides making you hungry?
The lesson here is that if you have a product or service that isn’t selling like you hoped – repackage it, rename it, repurpose it and reframe it.
For example: one of my coaching clients was offering a financial spreadsheet tool that helps people organize their money, but it wasn’t selling as well as she’d hoped. I suggested that she take the tool and pair it with a brief one-on-one consultation. Suddenly, she had a package that included an awesome financial tool, a consultation to maximize its impact--and an opportunity for her to sell her ongoing coaching services during the session. The value of the offering went up exponentially with that little tweak.
What product do you have that you can reframe or repackage? What can you turn from powdered cheese into powdered gold?
How about you sit down with a bowl of breakfast mac n cheese or a big ol’ breakfast cookie and write down your ideas? Then, share in the Comments below how it goes. Success is delicious.
-Jane