I think I’m the target audience for Triscuit’s Home Farming campaign ads. They keep popping up during my Food Network shows and in my Real Simple magazine. Or maybe they pop up everywhere, including places I wouldn’t see them like ESPN and car magazines, but I like to group myself in the foodie demographic and I hope marketers do too. Anyway, I wanted to learn more about the campaign and have since learned several things:
- Triscuit, a product of Kraft Foods, has teamed up with the non-profit Urban Farming to grow 50 community farms across the country.
- It has also launched a website encouraging consumers to plant their own gardens. The site includes instructions and tips for growing ingredients at home.
- Though Triscuit is contributing to a good cause, local gardening and sustainability, people have noticed that the corporation behind the campaign is potentially part of the reason the home gardening movement has grown so much over the years.
Counterproductive cracker campaign
This post by Laura Mathews on Punk Rock Gardens, a community gardening blog out of Pennsylvania, questions Triscuit’s and Kraft Foods’ motives. While the Home Farming campaign promotes home gardening and local eating, it is still being presented by Kraft Foods, a major producer of processed and prepackaged food. Mathews says Kraft is attempting to use this campaign to position its products as containing real ingredients, ignoring the fact that they’re really full of unnatural additives. She writes:
OK, it’s nice that a big company believes there a lot of interest in growing food. Enough interest, actually, that they want to grab on and join the gravy train. BUT, what I understand about the people who are taking back control of their food supply, is that they –we- became interested in growing food because we lost faith in the quality of food produced by companies like Kraft.
If you’re interested, read the rest of her post. It’s really good and it brings up a lot of great points.
Colbert’s conclusion
The whole idea of large corporations launching campaigns attempting to solve problems they may have contributed to reminded me of this utterly fantastic clip from the Colbert Report in April (seriously, watch it if you have time- it’s great. Skip to 1:13 to get right to the campaign part). In it, Colbert discusses how people were questioning KFC’s Buckets for the Cure campaign.
During the campaign, KFC donated 50 cents for each pink bucket of chicken sold to the Susan G. Komen for the cure, the non-profit that raises money for breast cancer research. However, as Colbert mentions in the clip, many people were upset at the idea of promoting the sale and consumption of unhealthy fried chicken to raise money for an organization that is working to save women’s lives.
He has his own theory on what to do to remedy KFC’s potential hypocrisy. I have my own. KFC, Kraft and all other corporations and organizations should think about what their campaigns say about their brands before they launch them. And consumers should consider what matters most to them: that companies are helping to solve problems when their products cause other ones or that the companies are helping at all.
Craving comments
So what do you think? Should people just appreciate these corporate campaigns for the help they’re supplying others? Or should we question the motives (and profit) behind them? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
It certainly is confusing that these companies would contradict themselves like that. I bet that they’re hoping that most people won’t look past these campaigns and that their reputation for the most part will be boosted, which is probably what will happen.
It is my opinion that Kraft and KFC should address bigger problems, like the fact that Kraft does use incredibly unnatural ingredients in their products and the fact that KFC actually released the double down instead of trying to make their food less likely to give people heart disease, a much more common cause of death in this country than breast cancer.
Also, I got my blog up and running so go check it out! I added you to my blogroll.
I’m an owner of a small, but growing olive oil company. Our ownership team has had several recent discussions about corporate social responsibility. On an individual level, we all agree that our day-to-day responsibilities would have much more meaning if we built a relationship with a worthwhile charitable cause. But as you aptly state, it’s not so simple. A company must think about what such a relationship/campaign says about their brand — even if our intentions are pure. Vastly different than, say, how a family chooses to direct their charitable donations. Our company has not yet landed on a solution, but our hearts are in the right place…so I’m confident we’ll soon find a meaningful partnership! Thanks for your post.