Although Doritos® is widely popular among older Middle Americans (35 to 55 years old), the brand's target is the guy in his early twenties, the college student with a youthful mindset who is constantly connected and who defines himself by his experiences. The brand calls them the “Hyperlifers.” In general, they're supporters of the relatively small LGBT demographic.
With the US Supreme Court ruling that made same-sex marriage legal, 2015 was a historic year for the LGBT movement. But though you can create laws, you can't legislate acceptance. The prospect of coming out can be so scary that suicide is the leading cause of death among young LBGT people in the US. Over 30 percent of them have attempted to kill themselves. For years Doritos has positioned itself as a snack “for the bold.” With Crash the Super Bowl coming to an end after 10 years, Doritos saw an opportunity to elevate the idea of “for the bold” in a culturally relevant way. The brand had always made strong moves, and it was time to take the next step.
How would we amplify the idea of being bold and take on a cause that's socially relevant while staying true to the brand's motto?
We launched a new product and challenged our target to demonstrate their support and fight the high rate of suicide among LGBT youth with their tweets and their donations.
To expand on what the brand positioning “for the bold” means and tell the world “there's nothing bolder than being yourself,” we got Doritos® to “come out” in support of those who haven't and created a product that was a social platform of support. The story of Doritos Rainbows involves the entire company and starts with the development of the first bag of multicolored, rainbow-colored chips ever created by Doritos. The bag was designed to allow each one to have a quote of support from someone in the LGBT community and was printed digitally to allow for such diversity, so each bag had a personal message of support, on the back. Bags of Doritos Rainbows weren't available for retail sale and could only be claimed online with a donation and a tweet. We wanted our consumers to adopt the cause. To claim a bag, they first decided how much they'd donate-starting at a minimum of $10-and then tweeted a quote of support with the hashtag #boldandbetter. Immediately after the announcement, thousands rushed to DoritosRainbows.com to get their historic chips. And as they did, they flooded their social networks with public demonstrations of encouragement by using the hashtag #boldandbetter. All the proceeds went to the It Gets Better Project and its mission to inspire hope among LGBT youth and fight suicide. The bags were delivered via mail in the weeks leading up to National Coming Out Day.
The product announcement for Doritos® Rainbows was the most successful in Frito-Lay's history, with 1.5 billion media impressions in 12 hours and 2 billion media impressions total-$170 million in ad-dollars equivalency-and positive sentiment in 84 percent of the coverage. All bags were claimed in less than 24 hours, raising $180,000 for the It Gets Better Project, their largest donation ever. Doritos Rainbows was a top trending topic on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram simultaneously, above the pope's recent visit to the US. Each post on Instagram generated 175 percent more likes than average-the brand's followers doubled with 20,000 new followers. Posts about Doritos Rainbows on Twitter generated 600 percent more retweets and 300 percent more likes than the average brand post, and 95 percent of the tweets were positive or neutral despite the polarizing subject. On Facebook, posts generated 30 times more shares than average, 12 times more likes and 70 times more comments, reaching 10 million people.