Limoneira Company has started a marketing campaign that uses quick response codes to promote lemon use beyond the kitchen.
The consumer campaign, “Unleash the Power of Lemons,” extends work begun by the Santa Paula, Calif.-based grower-shipper with the codes in a trade setting last year, said John Carter, director of global sales.
“As we revise our packaging, the QR code is something you’ll see on any product and through regular point-of-sale materials and display units,” Carter said.
Limoneira is working with customers to tailor those to their operations, he said.
When scanned on a smartphone, the codes take shoppers to a website displaying icons for recipes, health, beauty, cleaning and lifestyle. Three more — heritage, food safety and sustainability — feature the grower-shipper and its practices.
“Beyond fun uses of lemons and how-to’s that are easy to grasp, they can learn about Limoneira quickly,” Carter said. “It really promotes consumer confidence in what Limoneira is all about.”
One tip shows how to remove an ink stain from a shirt using lemon juice. In addition to information, some icons make brief videos accessible. The approach was initiated last year in the trade and included business-specific icons: global network and supply chain.
“We do a lot of export fruit, so we were faced with the challenge of how to communicate what we’re about in an international arena,” Carter said. “We used the QR codes to connect customers to a language page, for example Chinese. That allows a customer to understand core points about why we’re different.”
The company learned lessons there that it’s taking into the consumer realm.
“We saw there needs to be consistency with an icon related to a video that’s easy for a smartphone to handle,” Carter said. “Connecting to a website is not necessarily consumer friendly. Maybe you hear about a health benefit of onions. That information can be confusing if it’s in an inconsistent format. We are taking information and formatting it with a picture, a benefit it gives you and how it works.”
The aim is to entice shoppers into using lemons for household purposes, not just meals.
“The idea is to say that, boy, when you look around the store, it’s much more than just hanging out at the produce aisle or the seafood department,” Carter said.
“Everyone’s into local, but lemons are grown in specific locations and if we can show shoppers what we’re doing here in California, we can connect them to the tree,” he said.
The campaign will also appear in social media and in trade publications.
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