Now you can have a tasty beverage to wash down your crowdsourced ramen!
When Calpis set about creating the fourth flavor in the Fruits Calpis line-up they asked users of Mixi, Japan’s largest social networking service, for their ideas. The resulting flavor is Mixed Fruit, a blend of apple, pear, mandarin orange, and banana.
The collaboration, which began back in May, included all steps of the decision process—from flavor to ad copy to package design.
This certainly isn’t the first beverage-media tie-in product we’ve seen; however, the Calpis-Mixi collaboration also makes good use of the potential power of social networking sites to build customer loyalty. Like the publishing sites that mine SNS mobile novel sites for content, confident that online fans will turn into paying offline customers, Calpis can expect those participating Mixi users to feel a personal attachment to the product through their involvement.
