Americans are accustomed to such advertising gimmicks as race cars festooned with detergent labels and city buses toting around signs for jeans and underwear.
But bananas as billboards?In the latest twist of a technique that advertising executives call "cross-promotion," Dole Food Co. is putting stickers on millions of its bananas to hawk milk and the new cartoon movie "Anastasia."
For Dole, based in Westlake Village, Calif.,the aim is to create consumer demand for Dole bananas by enticing grocers to stock their bananas by promising increased sales of milk. Typically a store offers only one brand at a time.
"Our goal is mostly to improve brand recognition," said Dole spokeswoman Marta Maitles. "We try to put together programs for retailers that make it good for them to buy and sell Dole ba-nanas."
The milk sticker on bananas was the innovation of the California Milk Processor Board, the people who came up with the "Got Milk?" promotion that has run nationally since 1993.
The campaign is one of many run by agricultural producers and companies through government-supervised check-off funds they pay to promote their industry: Pork is "The Other White Meat," an egg is "The Incredible Edible Egg," and so on.
In recent years, dairy processors and farmers have pooled their money to contract with makers of products such as cereal, cookies and chocolate mix to advertise milk on their packages. A successful campaign put "Got Milk?" on Girl Scout cookies.
The milk board's idea is to remind shoppers when they buy other products that milk is the essential complement.
"What else are you going to drink with five boxes of mints?" said Jeff Manning, executive director of the California Milk Processor Board. "We need those people to promote for us. In return, we affectionately call them co-dependent foods. You can't use soda on cereal."
The dairy industry is always searching for an edge, because growth has been stagnant for years. Per-person milk and cream consumption fell from 30 gallons in 1986 to 26 gallons in 1995 and has remained relatively flat since, according to the Agriculture Department.
In a sea of brand-name products, the fresh produce section is one part of the store that still sells mostly generic products.
Stickers depicting company trademarks are used increasingly on produce and especially to distinguish the many kinds of apples, which are priced differently and can't carry a bar code. A sticker on an apple means a checkout clerk doesn't have to guess.