24
2009
Miracle Whip — The selling of cool
You’ve got to hand it to Miracle Whip. They recently launched an ad campaign that is 180 degrees from anything that’s ever been done in the mayonnaise category.
No moms in the kitchen exchanging recipes. No blind taste tests. Instead they show energetic 20-somethings partying it up with their favorite mayo, under the battle cry, “We will not tone it down.”
The campaign is clearly attempting to make Miracle Whip “cool.” And that’s where I think these ads fail miserably.
If you look at it from a marketing standpoint, every product category has a coolness continuum that it can reside in. For some, there is a lot of cool that can be created. Just ask the teenagers who buy Abercrombie clothing. Or the guys who buy Corvettes.
By the same token, there are products that have no coolness factor whatsoever. They’re never cool. They’re never uncool. They just, well, are. And along with lug nuts and pipe cleaners, mayo is right at the top of the “Can’t be Cool” list.
Mayo can be “delicious.” It can be “versatile.” It can be “helpful.” But it can never, ever, ever, ever be cool. It’s just not in its DNA. Which is why this campaign is so perplexing. I get that Miracle Whip is trying to reach a new, younger audience. But there are ways to do it without pandering to them.
The biggest mistake a marketer can make is to try to make their cool-neutral products seem trendy. By attempting to give it an aura of hipness (that’s a pretty uncool word, I know), they convey the opposite to their audience. They come off as marketing suits who truly don’t get the audience they’re trying to appeal to. They sound insincere. And they set themselves up for ridicule in the marketplace. Which is precisely what happened to Miracle Whip.
| The Colbert Report | Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| The Mayo-lution Will Not Be Televised | ||||
|
||||
