Usually when companies come out with a new and improved formula, they need the general public to understand. However when the item in question is an iconic food product, the calculus gets tougher. Every marketer remembers with a shudder the cautionary tale of New Coke.
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So when Kraft Heinz reached inside the blue box to tweak the recipe for its macaroni and cheese, it made a decision to whisper instead of shout the outcomes.
A new formula that removed artificial preservatives and swapped out artificial dyes for any mixture of paprika, annatto and turmeric have been under development for three years, and in April 2015 Kraft announced that it planned to make the switch. But when the reformulated version hit shelves in December, only customers paying careful attention towards the ingredients listed on the side of the box might have known. The orange colour of the mac and cheese remained exactly the same.
“We’ve sold well over 50 million boxes with essentially nobody noticing,” said Greg Guidotti, vice-president for meal solutions at Kraft Heinz.
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“It was absolutely brilliant of these to alter it and not say anything,” said Lynn Dornblaser, director of innovation and insight at the researching the market firm Mintel.
Now Kraft is getting a bit more vocal.
A new ad campaign plays up the component of surprise associated with the company’s new mac and cheese formula, with 15- and 30-second broadcast and online video spots featuring the previous late-night television host Craig Kilborn and also the saying, “It’s changed. However it hasn’t.”
Kraft was concerned that individuals would perceive a change in flavour that wasn’t really there whether it made too big an offer about the different formula when it started utilizing it. In fact, when the company made the announcement last spring that it could be tweaking the components, Guidotti said, people began posting on social networking their concerns the mac and cheese would taste different.
Our first advice to them wasn’t to inform anyone about this, that is unusual to have an ad agency
“We knew we desired to address that tension,” he said.
Some on social media even said, shortly after the April announcement, they thought the mac and cheese tasted different when, in reality, these were still eating the prior version. This can be a psychological quirk, well known to food manufacturers, that may stymie well-meaning attempts to make processed foods healthier.
Overcoming this type of hard-wired preconception required stealth.
“Our first advice to them wasn’t to inform anyone about this, that is unusual for an ad agency,” said Adam Chasnow, vice-president and executive creative director for Crispin Porter & Bogusky, Kraft’s partner in developing the campaign. “We’re going to focus on the proven fact that situations are still the same.”
Guidotti asserted since the company revealed that it had been using the new formula for some time, customer feedback continues to be generally positive, however, there was a spate of posts from customers claiming they actually had noticed the change. “Whenever you say something, people will say, ‘Ok last one, I knew that,’ ” he explained. “There’s psychology involved with there too.”
When you say something, people will say, ‘Ok last one, I knew that’
Before the campaign began, Kraft and Crispin Porter & Bogusky worried that a sharp-eyed fan or perhaps a food blogger would notice the changes towards the ingredients list and act as a spoiler.
“We were always concerned,” Guidotti said. “Should consumers discover sooner, we had contingencies. We’d a lot of different ways of launching our advertising sooner, launching our social sooner, having more specific responses.”
None of this proved to be necessary, not that Guidotti or his team are complaining.
“I think we probably did 5 times just as much work, however it was all worth it,” he explained.
