Frito-Lay’s Looking for the Ladies

As a Charlotte, NC advertising agency, birdsong gregory is always interested to see how big brands reach out to new audiences.

Frito-Lay, a division of PepsiCo, is overhauling all of its calorie-conscious snacks to make them appeal to women, including the baked versions of Lay’s, Fritos, Ruffles, Doritos, Cheetos and Tostitos; Smartfood; Flat Earth; and its 100-calorie packages of snacks. It has researched women’s feelings about snacking and guilt to produce new packaging, new flavors and a new advertising campaign, all in an effort to get women to eat Frito-Lay snacks.

According to Frito-Lay research, women snack only 14 percent of the time on salty foods. Women snack 25 percent of the time on sweet foods; the other 61 percent of snacking includes drinks, fruits and vegetables.

To figure out how to sell Frito’s salty snacks to women, Frito’s advertising agency turned to neuromarketing, which shows an ad to consumers and records the level of brain response.

The results: women can process ads with more complexity and more pieces of information, since the communication center in women’s brains is more developed. And the memory and emotional center in the brain, the hippocampus, is also proportionally larger in women, so Frito’s concluded that women would look for characters they could empathize with.

In addition to the new advertising campaign that targets female consumers, Frito’s is rolling out new packaging for their brands known to be more popular with women. Baked Lay’s, for example, will no longer come in a shiny yellow bag, but in a matte beige bag that displays pictures of healthier ingredients like spices or ranch dressing.