I like my spiders chewy: Argentine candy company Bonafide turns to the experts for new candy ideas--kids.

Three years ago Billiken was in a slump. Kids shunned the candy brand's fruit and menthol chews. Nova, it is one of the hottest assortments. "Kids come for Billiken," says Osvaldo Palandri, a kiosk owner in Buenos Aires. "We're not talking big numbers, but a big change. Kids weren't even asking for them before."

The turnaround is big for Bonafide, a confectionery and coffee company that bought the 40-year-old brand in 1992. Once strong, Billiken failed to regain appeal as the company, owned by Chiles Empresas Carozzi, relied on its reputation for quality to keep up sales. "Old fashioned" and "for my parents," were the complaints from children, recalls Juan Greco, marketing manager of Bonafide's candy unit, which is 70%-owned by Carozzi and 30% by South Africa's Tiger Brands.

With around 5% of the US$345,000 children's candy market, Billiken trailed a distant third behind Argentina's Amor, at 60%, and the 25% market share held by the U.K.'s Cadbury Schweppes.

To change things, Bonafide let kids have a whack at creating new varieties for Billiken, beginning in 2001. Executives took marketing inspiration from Big, the 1988 Tom Hanks movie about a kid trapped a 35-year-old's body who goes on to turn around a toy maker's sales by creating what lee and his friends would play with.

Bonafide's marketing campaign included the tagline: "Be a part of the dream. You create the candy, Billiken makes it for you." Ads directed kids to a Web site on which they could draw up their dream candies and vote for their favorites. At stake was the chance for their invention--with their name splashed on the packaging--to be sold around the country.

Kids took to it. Two months after the launch, 80,000 visits were registered on the site, twice the six-month target. Within a year, the tired brand was a stronger rival to Arcor and Cadbury with animal-shaped chews, including a spidershaped candy, gum flavored cookies covered in chocolate and sour dynamite jellies. By 2003, it was the second-fastest growing brand of kids' candies. In the first eight months, its market share rose to 7.9% from 6.8% in the same 2002 period, according to Argentine consulting firm CCR.

While a simple concept, letting kids invent what they want has revolutionized the way the company operates, from marketing to sales to the factory floor, says Greco. "You can try to think like a kid, but in the end you wind up thinking about whether you have the capacity, the molds, the colors and the packaging capabilities," lee says. "Kids don't have anything to win or lose. They're not influenced by what can or cannot be made or whether it is easy of difficult, cheap or expensive. Now we sit down in our development meetings and think like consumers, think about what we ourselves would like."

Monster pops. This new way of thinking has extended to other Bonafide brands, spurring it to launch nine new products in the last two years, something it hasn't done for more than a decade, says Greco.

With Billiken, it helped that the creative juices are stirred by an influx of ideas from kids. A total of 17,200 proposals were submitted in the first year, enabling Bonafide to launch three times the number of products each month than when the adults were on their own, says Greco.

Trouble is, in the end, a candy is a candy and kids are fickle. Billiken's spider chews sold fast at first, says Gabriel, another kiosk owner. But after that, sales let up and kids returned to Arcor products, he says. "If you came out with a new product every day, you'd sell them fast. That's the way kids are," he says. "But who can do that?"

Maybe none of the confectioners can keep up that pace, but Amor and Cadbury can beat Bonafide on price and volume as they have deeper pockets. Arcor had $700 million in revenue last year, while Cadbury posted $9 billion in global sales. Bonafide lagged with $48 million.

This year, Arcor has cranked up output by 16%, cut prices, packed in toys and stickers with candies and launched new products, taking hints from the trends and popular games and TV shows for children. Monster-shaped lollipops have hit the shelves and, to please parents, a calcium-fortified caramel, the only one in the market.

Greco is unfazed. "The competition could launch a similar product to what the kids create and undercut us in price, but the kids would know the difference. They would know which one is theirs."