Cuties! Positioning

What are Cuties?

They are the sweet, seedless, E-Z peel clementines!

I always found it strange that you would advertise a commodity, such as fruit.  I would think it would be difficult to nail down a target since everyone eats fruit.  How do you position a fruit?  What audience do you target?

Currently, Cuties are catered towards children.  Their website is cutieskids.com and they explicitly advertise to children.  The website, as well as the Facebook and Twitter page, feature kids and the benefits Cuties provide to young children.  Cuties are positioned as the perfect snack for children because they are sweet, seedless and easy to peel.  The Cuties website, tv commercials, Facebook and Twitter pages are all synonymous and send the same message.  

However, I think this would be tricky to advertise strictly to children because they have no purchasing power.  You would also have to appeal to mothers who would be making the purchase.  As it is, with the social media sites and website, children will most likely not see those.  The website does not offer any reason for a child to want to explore the site.  I think the digital elements of Cuties campaign is aimed toward the mothers.

I think if Cuties wants to remain positioned towards the children market, they should have some type of game on their webpage or something that brings kids to their website and will further reinforce their brand and the reasons why mothers should buy them.

If I was tasked with positioning and marketing Cuties, I would not choose a specific target.  I would try to create some type of game on the website to bring children to the website and put the Cuties name in their mouths so they tell their moms to buy them.  I would also create an in-store display that would catch shoppers attention immediately when they are in the produce section.  Since fruit is such a low-involvement purchase, it would be smart to target people right at the point of purchase.  The display could be stickers on the floor that bring people to the Cuties stand or a standing a-frame that lists benefits of the clementines.

I guess there is no right or wrong way to target or position fruit, but I think the best bet is target any purchaser of fruit because I know I buy Cuties.  They really are the perfect fruit snack!