The Island of Misfit Foods

Over the holidays, my partner Jim heard a story likely to disturb the sleep of a lot of food marketers:

A friend of mine told me that his New Year’s celebration included a trip to the grocery store with his two kids (8 and 10) so that each could pick out their own once-a-year box of sugary cereal. He told me that, although each of them had a different strategy for how to ration the box to make it last as long as possible, both wound up picking Lucky Charms as their annual treat. When he finished his story, the two of us dads reminisced about the good old days when our parents gave us Lucky Charms for breakfast every morning. My friend’s kids will grow up never once considering that Lucky Charms is a meal. To them, it’s a dessert, a treat.

I know, I know, we live in Portlandia, where happy, free-running, self-actualized chickens eat only sustainable, organic feed. How seriously should any self-respecting mass marketer take one anecdote of such cultural extremism? But the funny thing is, Jim told me this story on the day I returned from a trip to the heartland, where I had met with the CMO of a major, iconic American food brand, whose products, once a staple of my healthy Midwestern upbringing, are now sold exclusively as treats—small indulgences to celebrate moments worth rewarding.

I sense an accelerating trend toward marketing products that were once offered as foods as if they are now treats. It is a way of sidestepping health concerns, based on the idea that most people don’t really want to eat better, but they do want permission to eat what they already like and feel that it’s okay to reward themselves with treats and small indulgences from time to time.

Marketing some foods as treats seems perfectly natural. M&M’s has had spectacular success with a campaign that, at least in its early years, was all about our relationship with treats. In most of the early spots, Red and Yellow want to be the center of attention, but when they succeed in attracting attention, people want to eat them, so they have to run away. From a story point of view, that’s a perfect metaphor for our relationships with treats: We are attracted to things that are bad for us.

M&M’s could capitalize on this story because their product form seems to suggest an answer to the story problem: moderation. M&M’s are such innocent-looking, bite-sized bits of chocolate that they seem to embody moderation, something the M&M’s characters can’t quite master. Unable to moderate their own desires, Red and Yellow face dire consequences and provide a hilarious negative example for the audience.

Over the past 16 years, the M&M’s characters have remained popular with audiences of all ages, while the brand has largely escaped criticism as the obesity crisis engulfed much of the food business like a tsunami. Clearly, you can tell a story about small indulgences, about food brands as occasional treats. The line between food and treat, however, is now shifting so fast that, as more and more former food brands straggle ashore onto Treat Island, there just won’t be room for all of them. How many products can you think of that were perfectly acceptable foods when you were a kid that are now considered indulgent treats? Marketers will struggle to differentiate their products when all the brands on the island are telling essentially the same story.

Of course, not every food brand is marketed as a treat. In the early part of the last decade, Cheerios—with its heart-healthy message and a side panel that literally asked, “Who are you eating them for?”—practically sold itself as medicine. General Mills successfully extended that food halo to Honey Nut Cheerios, which is understandable from a story point of view, even if nutritionists aren’t all on board. But Frosted Cheerios and Chocolate Cheerios were actually both in the running when Jim’s friend took his kids to pick out their annual treats.

Our story assessment of this trend suggests a couple of principles:

  • Foods with genuine treat credentials are positioned to do well (Oreo, Krispy Kreme, M&M’s, Haagen Dazs), but the island doesn’t seem to be getting significantly bigger just because a lot of brands are crowding on. SO…
  • It will be increasingly important to have a distinctive and authentic story to tell about your particular role in the drama of Treat Island. Think, for example, about the difference in story energy between Oreo and just about every other cookie.

There is a strong tipping-point dynamic to the way story evolves in the food business. A brand without a firmly grounded story can be cruising along, comfortably selling a slightly better-for-you version of a venerable food product, and wake up one day stranded on the island without the skills and resources it needs to survive.

If you know a food brand that has built a good life for itself on Treat Island, I would love to hear the story.

The War on Food

A couple of weeks ago I was talking to a senior marketer at a major global food company and he described the current environment as “a full assault on food companies of all kinds.” I saw an interesting example of this assault at the TED Conference, where Jamie Oliver (the Naked Chef) was awarded this year’s TED Prize and delivered a very engaging rant about the state of the food business. Here is a link if you’re interested.

Anecdotes like these suggest to me that the story energy in the food business is undergoing a tectonic shift. Over the past sixty years, one of the overarching conflicts in the category has been ease versus virtue. Virtue has generally meant health or nourishment in some form, while ease has meant convenience, along with value, taste, fun and indulgence. Unsurprisingly, ease has been the dominant story current.

One of the rules of story is that when one side of a conflict is suppressed for a long time the suppressed energy will eventually emerge with extra force. It feels like we are approaching a tipping point at which the virtue side of the food story is getting ready to assert itself with a vengeance. If so, then food companies that can embrace this conflict in an authentic way will prosper, and those that can’t will get swamped by the wave.

Embracing the conflict between ease and virtue means presenting an original, engaging and credible take on the collision of the two energies. One brand that seems to have been doing this pretty well is Newman’s Own. The virtue energy in the story is very clear in the idea of “all profits for charity.” It is strongly underscored by the perception that Paul Newman himself could have lived a life of self-indulgence but chose the virtues of faithfulness and family, partnering with his daughter in this business for the fun of making unusually good stuff and sharing it with the world.

The ease side of the Newman’s Own story is visible in the kinds of products the brand initially chose to create–comfort foods and snacks, for example–and also in the very fact that the brand seems to dabble in a wide and eclectic range of foods, making it easy for me to browse through sections of the store that might otherwise present a confusing range of choices.

Coke, on the other hand, is a brand that got a tremendous boost from the ease-versus-virtue story in its formative years, and has suffered as the definition of virtue has shifted to pull the floor out from under its story. The idea of putting refreshment “within an arm’s reach of desire” is very compelling so long as the energy boost and refreshment offered by a bottle of Coke feels like a virtue.

McDonald’s story has described a similar arc, beginning when Ray Kroc took the easy, tasty indulgence of the drive-in and added the virtues of safety, cleanliness and responsibility. That story was captured with deep cultural resonance in the idea that “You deserve a break today.” Now, McDonald’s is scrambling to evolve its menu so that it can continue to offer an interesting collision of indulgence and responsibility without alienating its regular customers.

Pretending that the two energies are not really in conflict (as Kentucky Fried Chicken tried to do at the height of the Atkins craze by suggesting that KFC had suddenly become “health food”) will undermine any hope of authenticity and runs the risk of leaving the audience feeling betrayed. The only way forward is to figure out how to embrace the conflict with grace and integrity. That may be hard to do, but it does make for an engaging and emotionally satisfying story.

If you have other examples of companies in the food business who are doing a good job of embracing the conflict, I would love to hear them.