Ok. Before you do anything else or read on – watch this video:
How does it make you feel? Like baby carrots are the next cool thing to eat? Like an intense snack that will make you just as hip as the people in the commercial?
I was reading an NPR article on grocery stores like Giant Eagle and Walmart testing a concept that markets snack-sized fruit and vegetables like junk food in order to get more kids (and, I guess, adults) to eat it.
Besides the extreeeeme video, the campaign also features new products: pureed fruit tubes that kids can suck on, all-fruit smoothies, and ‘shake downs’ which are bags of baby carrots (you know it) with cheeto-style seasoning powders that will stick to your hands just like that other orange dust will.
Along the vein of the broccoli marketing campaign we talked about earlier, this is an attempt to bring traditional marketing methods over to the produce aisle – except this time, it’s for real!
But will it work? How easy is it to change the image of a product?
Personally, the ad video left me a little underwhelmed – it’s so over the top it seems to be a parody of ‘let’s try to make a vegetable look hip’. But then again, I just read another article that was talking about advertizing to children and teenagers and how it seems painfully obvious and over the top for adults, but that you have to let go of subtlety to reach your audience in that case. And it’s not as if the ads for games or other junk food are different – I guess the disguise is nearly too good because it fits in so well with the ads I despise.
I’m more convinced of the new formulations – the carrots with the flavorings and the slurpee-style smoothies. Those, I think, are super clever ways to reinvent what snack food looks and tastes like. (Not to poo-poo the party, but I’d like to see the ingredient list of those powders though and see what percentage of daily sodium content they would make up).
This video below gives some more context and ties in well with the last post on fruit vending machines, since the baby carrots also pop up in vending machines around schools.
One last question on my mind though – is the media hype because of this campaign’s success with customers or because of the sheer novelty and (potentially) hilarity factor of the approach? But then again, does it matter as long as ‘extreme baby carrot’ gets nation-wide coverage and is in everybody’s ear?
Would you buy more baby carrots after seeing the commercial? Or only those with ranch flavoring? 😉