Del Monte Licks Opposition (with a little help from Taylor Herring).

LONDON; 22nd October 2009; Taylor Herring’s 007 lolly has helped Del Monte top the latest Kaizo Advocacy Index published today in Food and Drink technology magazine.

The Kaizo Advocacy Index is a biannual study that measures the online reputation of 20 brands across Food, Software, Airline and Mobile sectors. The study examines independent links on four Google search engine tools – Web, News, Groups and Blogs, as well as posts on Twitter and Facebook Groups. Content is assigned a positive (Promoter), neutral (Passive) or negative (Detractor) sentiment score and an index is created by subtracting the percentage of Promoters from the percentage of Detractors.

Del Monte, Virgin Atlantic, T-Mobile and Symbian led their individual sectors with scores of 45%, 33%, 7% and 13% respectively. The worst performing brands across each sector were Heinz (8%), Ryanair (-62%), O2 (-20%) and Microsoft (-9%).

Del Monte demonstrates that brands using creative methods to engage with consumers and promote positive online conversations can quickly find themselves ahead of the competition.

The brand increased its score by a massive 54% to knock Virgin Atlantic off top spot after previously coming bottom of the previous Kaizo Index conducted at the start of the year in which Del Monte recorded the lowest score of all the food brands (-9%).

The turnaround is largely due to the launch of a low calorie frozen dessert in the shape of James Bond actor Daniel Craig’s torso after over 1,000 women voted him to be the celebrity they would most like to lick. The campaign provoked comments such as “Ooooh yum” after over 1,000 women voted him to be the celebrity they would most like to lick.