Arla

Background
The Arla Foods Group is Europe’s second largest dairy company. In the 2005/06 fiscal year, the Group received 8.4 billion kg milk and a turnover of approx. 48 billion DKK. Arla’s website (http://www.arla.se) is among the most popular websites in Sweden with over 500.000 unique visitors per month, with the Arla online cookbook being the main attraction. The online cookbook promotes Arla’s dairy products in an non-intrusive way and makes Arla the natural choice of preference. In May 2006 Arla Sweden decided to investigate the potential of using the mobile channel to further extend the reach of the brand and get their services closer  to the clients.

Solution
Golden Gekko’s proposal to Arla was to offer their customers a downloadable application based on the online cookbook and Golden Gekko’s existing portfolio of mobile products with the following key features

• A selection of 330 popular recipes all including one or more Arla products
• Each recipe including a short description, shopping list, cooking instructions and a  full screen image of the dish
• Bookmark for favourite recipes
• Send to a friend option, encouraging customers to forward on the application to the people they know

In addition to the features above the cookbook was later extended by adding functionalities such as free text search, dynamically updated recipes of the day, most popular recipes, product news from Arla and more.
The key benefits to Arla and Arla’s customers with the application are

• Great recipes and cooking inspiration instantly available a few clicks away , even without mobile network access
• A tool as easy to use and as quick as playing a mobile game, which more than 55% of all mobile users in W. Europe have done at least once
• Promotional material free of charge to the end user except for data traffic when downloading the application
• Compatible with over 800 phones covering 95% of all devices in use in Sweden today
• Flexibility to continuously update the service with new features and new recipes with quick turn around times at a reasonable cost

Result
The service was launched on October 1st  2006 as a pilot positioned among other cooking tools on Arla’s website, with limited exposure. During the first 3 months the mobile cookbook had more than 10.000 downloads and over the 2007 Arla mobile cookbook became one of the most downloaded mobile applications in Sweden with over 80.000 downloads, mainly thanks to it’s exposure on more than 1 million milk bricks distributed in Sweden. An average user uses the mobile cookbook once every 8 days and has shown the application to 2.8 other people further promoting the Arla brand and the mobile cookbook. 20% of the users have forwarded the application to their friends. In addition to exposing the Arla brand and their products the service also succeeded in getting media publicity extending Arla’s image as an innovative brand. And this is only the beginning…
Arla and Golden Gekko are now working together to expand the service with more interactivity, direct links to purchase through mobile coupons and several other innovative features.