Are They Nuts? Why Pistachio Marketers Bet Big on Internet Memes

The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. An important consideration in any marketing plan is does your product brand match the product reality? Changing a companys brand perception is extremely difficult but possible. Read how Dell and Xerox successfully underwent a major brand revamp.

Imagine for a second that your job is marketing pistachio nuts. There are several well-trod routes to pursue. You can emphasize your products considerable health benefits or maybe you could work on some kind of variation of Young & Rubicams 1963 slogan for Lays Potato Chips, Betcha cant eat just one.

Or maybe you can go in a completely different direction.

Thats what Domenic Engels, the then-head marketer for Paramount Farms, did in 2009. Since that time, the brand has been running one of the weirdest campaigns in consumer packaged goods. The cast of characters promoting the brand has run the gamut from Bristol Palin baby-daddy Levi Johnston to the Winklevoss Twins to disgraced former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich to the Honey Badger. The Get Crackin campaign has done more than just get attention, though. From September 2010 to this October, sales for Wonderful Pistachios rose 134% by volume, according to SymphonyIRI. That came after similar triple-digit growth the year before.

Needless to say, when the brand set on its unique course two years ago, it wasnt immediately obvious that getting gossip fixtures and Internet memes to endorse your brand was a winning strategy.

Luckily for Fire Station, the advertising agency that executed the campaign, getting the client on board wasnt a problem. Thats partially because of a unique arrangement between Wonderful Pistachios and Fire Station. Both are owned by the same holding company, Roll Global. Such a situation is highly unusual in the ad business where, as loyal Mad Men viewers know, ad execs are constantly on edge about potentially losing accounts.

While Fire Station is an outlier as an agency, though, the client is also a bit of offbeat. The people behind Wonder! ful Pist achios are Stewart and Lynda Rae Resnick, the billionaire couple who turned pomegranate juice into a $100 million business in the 00s (and supported Morgan Spurlocks product placement doc, Pom Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever Sold). The two used a combination of health claims and clever marketing (including an hourglass-shaped glass bottle) to convince Americans to try pomegranate juice. By the latter part of the decade, the Resnicks set their sights on another part of their agricultural holdings a large pistachio orchard in Californias San Joaquin Valley.

As the Resnicks began selling pistachios to consumers rather than other marketers, though, the industry hit a rough patch. In March 2009, the FDA initiated a precautionary recall of pistachios over salmonella concerns. Though just one grower accounting for less than 1% of the industrys volume was responsible, category sales fell 60%. Wonderful Pistachios was proactive, though, and addressed the situation with PistachioRecall.org, which provided users with information about the recall and linked to the FDAs site.

That fall, the brand earmarked $15 million for a campaign featuring, among others, Levi Johnston, the then-19 year-old known for impregnating Sarah Palins daughter. In the ad, which is no longer available on YouTube, Johnston states that he opens pistachios with protection his bodyguard. Johnstons appearance was probably the most notable in that leg of the campaign, which featured other sorta celebs like Brady Bunch alum Christopher Knight, Adrienne Curry and Wee-man from Jackass.

Over the course of the next two years, the campaign would integrate other C- or D-listers, but also some Internet memes. The first was Keyboard Cat, one of the most-viewed YouTube videos of all time. The video was shot in 1984, so the original Keyboard Cat was long gone. But the cats owner, Charlie ! Schmidt, was, and gave his blessing for this November 2010 ad:

Others followed, most notably an ad featuring the Honey Badger and another that starred the Winklevoss twins, the Harvard classmates of Mark Zuckerberg who famously sued him for allegedly stealing an idea of theirs that became Facebook. The twins amiably referenced their back story in this ad:

Getting the Winklevii on board wasnt easy. As Mike Perdigao, president of Fire Station Agency, recalls: They were certainly hesitant at first. They didnt want to be made fun of, and they wanted to be sure they were in on the joke. We had a number of conversations before determining a final script we all felt comfortable with.

The ads worked as promised, generating lots of free press. But for industry watchers, it raised some questions. First, if using notorious celebs and Internet memes is such a great idea, why doesnt everyone do it? Second, will this really help the brand in the long term?

Rob Frankel, a Los Angeles-based branding expert, emphatically answers no to the second question. Relying on the borrowed interest of celebrities is a short-term strategy at best, he says. Frankel is unimpressed with the fact that Wonderfuls sales have risen since the campaign started. Everybodys sales are probably going to go up when you pump as much media as they have, he says. This is not a brand strategy, its an advertising strategy, and they are very different. When you have a brand strategy, you should be able to articulate why Id pay $5 for Wonderful Pistachios versus $2 for pistachios at Trader Joes.

In Wonderfuls defense, Marc Seguin, senior marketing director for Wonderful Pistachios, points out that the ads do articulate reasons to buy Wonderful Pistachios: All of our ads remind consumers that pistachios are the lowest calorie and lowest fat snack nut, he says. Making sure consumers understand that pistachios are not just! fun and great tasting, but also good for them, is going to be critical for long-term growth.

In other words, the ads may not provide a reason to buy Wonderful Pistachios versus other kinds of pistachios per se, but they offer an argument to eat more pistachios. The hope, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, is that a rising tide will lift all boats. The strategy has been employed before, but usually when a new product hits the market, like GPS units. The first mover invariably sinks marketing funds into an education campaign that explains the new category. Only later can the advertiser explain why his device is better than the competition.

That said, theres nothing new about nuts. There is, however, a precedent. In the early 90s, the California Milk Processor Board introduced a star-studded campaign to get people to drink more milk not just their milk, but everyones. The idea worked better than anyone imagined it would. Hence, Wonderfuls confidence in its quirky campaign: After all, following in the footsteps of Got Milk? isnt all that nuts.

Series supported by IDG

The Modern Media Agency Series is supported by IDG. Xerox and Dell have executed major rebranding programs in the past few years. Such an initiative can be difficult to accomplish, but IDCs Rich Vancil thinks both companies offer a roadmap for how marketers can rebrand successfully

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