Snapple Case Analysis

Snapple In 1972, Brooklyn New York, Snapple commenced its modest beginnings. Starting in apple flavor, Snapple was sold in health-food stores but became successful when it started launching innovative products based on fruit juices and teas. Snapple was marketed with the accompanying mantra of "100% Natural" which made the brand quite popular and it helped it survive in its market segment. Being neither a lifestyle nor a high class brand, Snapple was considered a mid class brand. The price was relatively high and their ads were always a mess. Having Ivan Lendl as a spokesperson in their initial commercial, he pronounced it "Shnapple" instead of "Snapple" which made the commercial to be a success due to the fact that it was such bad quality with such bad pronunciation. Snapple didn't care how their commercials came out to be as long as everything came out to look real, natural (ex: "100% Naural"). They started using Wendy Kaufman as their spokes model. She was a normal real person who became famous nationwide very soon because everyone loved her. She received invitations to Oprah, David Letterman, sleepovers and prom dates. In 1994 Snapple was purchased by Quaker for 1.7 billion. Quaker had already developed Gatorade into a billion dollar brand and even though its CEO didn't consider Snapple was worth 1.7 billion he still decided to purchase and develop the brand. Their plan was to use Snapple’s distributors in the cold channel in order to help Gatorade and used Gatorade's strength in supermarkets to help Snapple. They though that if they used the same strategy as for Gatorade, they will help Snapple but they failed to understand the market differences, target markets and customer preferences. This left customers feeling betrayed and with the impression that Snapple was “selling- out”. Quaker replaced Wendy and ended the contract with Howard Stern which produced bad press. They refused to take in consideration the strategies of the previous leaders of Snapple