Brief:

• Foster Farms is promoting its Dori mobile assistant with an emoji-driven social media campaign, according to an announcement. The poultry processor's packaging has QR codes to scan with a smartphone camera to activate Dori's features.
• The campaign seeks to help customers match their Thanksgiving "personalities" with humorous emojis, including the Procrastinator, Trendy Wendy and the Guru of Gravy.
• Foster Farms first introduced Dori in September, and has added additional content to help Thanksgiving chefs including recipes, hacks and a "poultrypedia" to help shoppers understand the information on package labels. Dori also helps connect consumers with its giving campaign that has provided more than 600,000 meals to families in need.

Insight:

Foster Farms' campaign for its Dori mobile platform is a fun way to engage shoppers as they prepare for their big Thanksgiving meal. Emojis are meant for sharing in messages and social media posts, giving them the power to go viral among mobile users while promoting a brand. Emojis remain popular, and push notifications that include emojis are opened 254% more often than those without, according to a Leanplum study.

While Dori has a Thanksgiving Turkey Helpline to call for cooking advice during the leadup to the holiday, the QR code activation gives shoppers a broad menu of features to help them while they're in the store. QR codes originally had difficulty gaining popularity in the United States because they required smartphone users to download a separate app, but Apple has helped to boost the popularity of QR codes after adding an automatic QR code reader to iPhones, giving millions of consumers instant access to the technology. As another sign of the growing popularity of QR codes in the United States, 7-Eleven this week began testing a mobile self-checkout feature that lets customers skip the checkout line and pay for their purchases using the convenience chain's app.

Foster Farms, a privately owned and operated company since 1939, mainly services the West Coast. Its mobile push comes as competitor Butterball expanded its long-running Turkey Talk-Line with the addition of an Amazon Alexa skill.