Prestige Brands employing social media and digital marketing to enhance branding efforts

TARRYTOWN, N.Y. — Prestige Brands' Matthew Mannelly, CEO, president and director, on Thursday outlined a number of ways that Prestige is utilizing social media to enhance its brand offering. 

 

For example, the three latest flavors launched across the Luden's franchise were all crowdsourced. "We're really excited about the new flavors that we're introducing," Mannelly said. The new flavors for today's generation include new watermelon, blue raspberry and sugar-free black cherry. "This is an interesting example of how we [used social media to come] about those flavors," he said. "We utilized crowdsourcing in terms of feedback from consumers to get their thoughts on what should be the best new flavors, and that helped us in deciding to launch those three flavors."

 

Looking forward, Prestige plans to employ new real-time mobile marketing technology that will push out offers to consumers in proximity of a retail pharmacy outlet at the time a cold is going viral, literally. "Some of the things that we're looking at is, your smartphone eventually is going to be able to proactively tell you that there's a red alert in terms of FAN flu says that cough-cold incidences are up X% in your region of the country," Mannelly said. "It's also going to be able to tell you we know you have two kids younger than 5 as a result of your Facebook page. And therefore, since we know you're by a CVS or a Walgreens or a Walmart, here's a coupon to go in to that store to buy some product to help you in terms of fighting the cough-cold season. That type of marketing is not too far off. Those are some of the things that we're looking at, and it's actually very exciting in terms of where it's going with digital marketing."