Brands forking marketing strategies

Social media boosts interactive promotion

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Deciding which utensil to use when eating macaroni and cheese might not sound like the most pressing question, but questions like that are exactly what marketers want consumers to be asking themselves.

Kraft Macaroni & Cheese took to Twitter on July 10 to start a campaign based on that seemingly innocuous question.

Over the next few days, the post attracted quite a bit of attention, with about 1,700 responses and more than 114,000 votes in a digital poll. Debate between what the company dubbed “team spoon” and “team fork” became heated as hundreds of Twitter users turned their utensil preference against each other.

The support for the debate by Kraft Heinz, manufacturers of the cheesy favorite and dozens of other packaged foods, is part of a strategy to promote “talkability,” said Michelle St. Jacques, head of brand and innovation for the company in the United States. The company has dual headquarters in Pittsburgh and Chicago.

“We’re always trying to identify new ways to connect with our consumers,” she said. “[The mac and cheese campaign] started because we saw online that people werehaving this debate already.”

The company also promised to change the image on the box — which had previously alternated between fork and spoon — based on the results of the poll. With 61 percent of the vote going to “team fork,” the boxes will start to feature tines underneath thepasta sometime next year.

The mac and cheese effort is part of a broader trend as companies move toward using social media interactively. It’s a shift that crosses into the real world as well.

On July 9, St. Louis-based Build-A-Bear Workshop, which operates more than 400 teddy