The pull of treats on the streets Playing to an audience: Mr Kipling bus stop cake dispensers and put a new spin on techniques first developed by Benjamin Babbitt in the 19th century The Christmas grocery shop was a little more bearable for some this year thanks to - almost literally - all-singing all-dancing machines that cascaded free slices of Christmas cake alongside sensory bursts of festive aroma and carol singing. The Mr Kipling cake dispensers were dreamt up by Premier Foods, which had ran a similar campaign, fronted by actress Joanna Page in the summer, in which free slices of sponge cake were available at the press of a button. The dispensers are in the vanguard of efforts by the snack industry to woo consumers on the streets. They also mark a growing trend in the cut-throat battleground to win a share of consumers" shrinking purses by combining modern technology with some of the oldest tricks in the advertisers" book: free samples and cash giveaways. For there is nothing new about free samples: they have been around for the best part of two centuries and probably longer. Benjamin Babbitt is generally regarded as the godfather, dispensing free soap in the US and telling 19th century shoppers: "A fair trial is all I ask for." Some 160 or so years later and the message is barely unchanged even if the new methods would baffle Babbitt: Kellogg's, the US-based cereals maker, launched its move into savoury snacks late last year by offering free samples to whoever dropped into a pop-up shop and sent a tweet about it. The pull to the streets is a testament to people power and, conversely, the declining pull of television, says Steve Knox, senior adviser to the Boston Consulting Group. These are dy­n­amics, it could be argued, that hark bark to Victorian times, when servants" chat below stairs was the Twitter of its day. "In today's new market of digital and social media, the consumer is harder and harder to reach, and if you do reach them, they are harder to resonate with - it is harder to win their trust," says Mr Knox, formerly head of the word-of-mouth marketing division at Procter & Gamble, the US consumer goods group. That points to what for marketers is the curse of 21st century living: a welter of information directed at consumers combined with a wised-up reluctance to take the manufacturer's word for their products. Rules for modern sampling ● Know your target consumer and locate sampling activities accordingly. To reach young men in particular, Coca-Cola gave out samples at music festivals, sporting events and college campuses. ● Target according to marketing goals. Hence Premier Foods" dispensers at bus stops to show cake can be eaten on the go. ● Hand out products that are noticeably different or new to consumers. Kellogg's did this when it handed out snacking crisps to people who associated the brand with breakfast cereals. ● Find a way to surprise the consumer, whether through performance (such as Nestlé"s use of GPS), packaging, and so on. ● Give the consumer an easy way to talk about the experience using online media, which magnifies the effects. Source: Boston Consulting Group Stuart Sheldon, co-president of New York-based boutique agency Escalate, points to data showing that the average American male is exposed to more than 3,000 branded messages in the course of a single day through paid-for ads and media - "everything from an ad on a matchbook cover to TV commercials or billboards." Yet three-quarters of those people do not trust the organisation that paid to put the message in front of them, while 92 per cent do trust recommendations from friends. Put all that together, says Mr Sheldon, and the "see, feel, touch, smell experience . . . is the way it's going to go." Manufacturers do seem to agree that sampling wins buyers. One of the latest campaigns enabled Tweeters to try Kellogg's crisps, and share their opinion. For Kellogg's, which set up a pop-up "tweet shop" in London's Soho last October, the aim was to do something different in keeping with its diversification from breakfast cereals into snacking crisps. "You would not expect to see us outside supermarkets and selling crisps," says Paul Whelan, who led the UK campaign. Premier Foods was thinking along similar lines for Mr Kipling. Its cakes were seen by consumers as "an occasional treat to be enjoyed at home," at least partly because they were considered too messy and crumbly to eat outside. The introduction of new snack packs, in which slices are wrapped individually in plastic, was designed to encourage putting cake in lunch boxes, pockets or bags. It was to underline the "eating on the go" aspect that the dispensers were set up at bus stops and outside supermarkets. Coca-Cola, the soft drinks manufacturer, was seeking to change consumer attitudes when it launched its new zero-calorie drink. For many consumers, reduced fat, sugar or calories translates as "taste deficient," so Coca-Cola set up stalls across the US to prove otherwise. Some 10m samples of the fizzy drink were handed out across 42 US cities in 2009 on the favoured stomping grounds of the target audience of young men: music festivals, sporting events and college campuses in what Escalate, which managed the campaign, claims was the biggest such programme. But even with all its resources, Coca-Cola could not ensure all its samples went to potential buyers of the drink, which highlights a big drawback that sampling shares with TV advertising: inefficiency in reaching the target audience because anyone could ask for a sample. In the case of Mr Kipling, Premier Foods was targeting the "main grocery shopper gatekeeper of treats for households" - mothers, in other words - but its machines contained no way to prevent, say, penniless but patient teenagers helping themselves to a sackful. The UK food producer mitigated such risks by dispensing cakes between 7am and 7pm and rel­easing samples a minute apart "to help prevent eager triallists from pressing the button over and over again." Manufacturers experimenting with delivering samples concede that measuring the effectiveness of this strand of a campaign can be difficult. Kellogg's points out that the pop-up shop generated more than 3,000 tweets, of which 96 per cent were positive and says it succeeded in "generating a buzz." There may be nothing more up close and personal than the promise that eating a chocolate bar will activate a team of people to locate you via a GPS chip hidden in the wrapper. Late last year, Nestlé launched a "We Will Find You" stunt, in which GPS chips were placed in six chocolate bars, including KitKat, Aero and Yorkie. When opened, the wrapper sends a signal of the location to the organisers at Nestlé, who dispatch a representative to hand over £10,000 in cash. Offers to claim smaller prizes, not involving GPS, were included in further wrappers. Like its fellow advertisers, Nestlé points to social media to illustrate the success of its GPS-tracked cash giveaway: KitKat gained 150,000 Facebook fans over the period of the campaign, taking it to about 890,000. So far, however, the big cash winners have chosen to remain anonymous, depriving Nestlé of a clutch of genuine real-life stories that could have embellished its Facebook page and generated still more traffic and consumer "engagement." Faceless winners, however, are infinitely preferable to the pickle - and lawsuit - that carmaker Toyota found itself in 2008. A highly experimental campaign in which prank-style emails, designed to be read by a target group interested in its new Matrix car - and who would understand their context as they referenced the Matrix movie - were more widely distributed, to the alarm of some recipients. Mixing in old tried and trusted marketing tools with careful use of the new technology looks like the better strategy.