Unleashing The Flaming Hot Website UX For Cheetos

Niharikarathee
Marketing in the Age of Digital
4 min readOct 9, 2022

Are website UX for established brands useful? With a total of 161.4k users in a mont, Cheetos’s website is ranked #298,192 globally and #639 in the food and beverage category. Is that good or bad? Let’s find out.

Cheetos has been a part of every childhood. It is a crunchy corn puff snack brand made by Frito-Lay, a subsidiary of PepsiCo. Fritos creator Charles Elmer Doolin invented Cheetos in 1948, and began national distribution in the U.S. Instead of being a chip, through the way Cheetos are made, they fit into a different category completely — puffs. “It’s actually a corn puff,” the Food Network video stated. “The crunchy variety is fried, while the puffs are baked.” Cheetos are actually cheesy corn puffs, not chips.

What is the Importance of a Website for Cheetos -

https://www.similarweb.com/website/cheetos.com/#overview

Websites are useful because anyone can access to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Even during non-business hours, customers can access the website and avail services or get the information they need, which is one of the key elements in the importance of a website in business. In case of Cheetos which is a brand everyone is aware of. It is useful when customers want to get information about what interesting things the brand is doing other than just listing their products for customers to buy. The primary purpose of the Cheetos websites is exactly that. It is simply to present, share, or display some information, content, campaigns, new launches online that the brand is indulging in.

Has the Website done justice to the brand Personality?

The Cheetos website is as colorful and impactful as the packaging of their products. This says a lot about the aesthetic the brand follows. They have tried to make the product exciting my highlighting the mascot, products and colors of the brand. It would have been disappointing to see a dull website for Cheetos. As soon as a customer thinks of Cheetos, they think of the colors — red, orange and black and they have followed this theme throughout their website content. The website is clean, user friendly and consists of all the important or necessary content a website must entail. It does justice to the personality of the brand.

Desktop V/S Mobile -

Is the content entertaining, convincing, inspiring, does it educate, or is it boring?

There is not much difference in the website when logged in from a desktop or a mobile. The website is carefully designed to make it look similar on a big or a small screen. However, there is one problem — The website loading speed is slower on the mobile device than on a desktop. This might be a red flag for the brand. On both desktop and mobile website the content is around the videos of campaigns, recipes, social media and products of the brand in the same format. The design of their website is nothing more than ordinary. It is a basic format that almost all brands follow for employing responsive design. The first banner has videos which usually makes the website slow but not in Cheetos’s case. They have well designed their content videos to make sure it does not slow the speed down. Overall, the content is not as entertaining as the aesthetics of the website. This also might be a reason of such high bounce rate which is 52.21%. An average visit duration of a customer on the Cheetos website is 00:02:03. It only has one feature which is to sign up and it does not clearly state what the sign up is for which can be misleading.

Using AI to improve the Website Conversions and New Customer Acquisition -

https://www.similarweb.com/website/cheetos.com/#demographics

The website does not create much conversions as it is a retail first brand. For a customer to consider buying through the website over a retail store, the website should offer more than what it is already offering. If Cheetos starts selling packs of 3 at a discounted price that might improve the conversion rate. According to similarweb.com the audience composition can reveal a site’s current market share across various audiences. Cheetos’s audience is 60.64% male and 39.36% female. The largest age group of visitors are 25–34 year olds. Focusing on more content targeting the female audience will help the website generate more users. The top traffic source to cheetos.com is search traffic, driving 83.20% of desktop visits last month, and direct is the 2nd with 15.50% of traffic. The most underutilized channel is mail. Improving their email infographics and reconsidering what they are offering in competition to the other brands might also contribute to better the working of the website.

Conclusion -

Once the user is on your website It takes about 50 milliseconds (that’s 0.05 seconds) for users to form an opinion about your website that determines whether they like your site or not, whether they’ll stay or leave. Cheetos has been successful in achieving this but they need to create more engaging content to make the users stay for longer.

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Marketing in the Age of Digital
Marketing in the Age of Digital

Published in Marketing in the Age of Digital

thoughts and reflections on digital-first marketing from NYUSPS Integrated Marketing Grad Students

Niharikarathee
Niharikarathee

Written by Niharikarathee

An aspiring Digital Marketing Consultant