• by Christine Champagne , December 29, 2010

To combat sagging market share, Bolthouse and CP+B pitted baby carrots against junk food

For many years, people ate plain old carrots, and they liked them. But carrots weren't very exciting, so clever farmers gave birth to the baby carrot in the 1980s.

For the sake of accuracy, it should be noted that baby carrots aren't actually carrots that have been plucked from the earth as infants. Baby carrots come from a whole carrot that has been bred to grow long and thin and uniform in diameter. These whole carrots are then cut into three or four "baby carrots" and peeled before they are packaged, making them edible right out of the bag.

And now you know.

Convenient, tasty and chock-full of beta carotene, baby carrots were an instant hit with consumers looking for a quick, convenient way to eat veggies. "For 10 or 15 years, the [baby carrot] industry had the tiger by the tail. There was more demand than there was capacity," says Bryan Reese, chief marketing and innovation officer at Bolthouse Farms.

But eventually growth slowed, and in the last couple of years, sales of baby carrots have dropped a couple of percentage points, Reese says. Concerned that people had begun to think of baby carrots as "boring," Bolthouse Farms figured it was time to do something bold - to position baby carrots not simply as a commodity but as a brand, and to start marketing them outside the produce aisle.

Baby Steps
CP+B was hired to create a integrated marketing campaign for baby carrots, and both the client and agency quickly agreed that it wasn't necessary to push the obvious - everyone knows carrots are good for you. But does everyone realize what a great snack baby carrots are? No. So it was decided that baby carrots would be promoted as a snack food.

Of course, when we think snack food here in the United States, baby carrots and other healthy options don't tend to leap to mind. Our salt- and sugar-obsessed taste buds drive us to stuff our faces with chips and candy and cookies - also known as junk food, although the junk food industry would rather we called it "snack food."

Baby carrots are about as far away as you can get from junk food, but the creative team at CP+B found some commonalities. "When we started looking at the product [baby carrots], we saw they were neon orange, crunchy and even addictive like Cheetos or Doritos once they're within arm's reach," says CP+B vice president and creative director Omid Farhang. "And that's where it got interesting for us. We said, Well, maybe if we share all of these qualities with these snacks, maybe the only thing missing is the junk-food marketing."

That line of thinking made sense to Reese. "We don't think we're losing consumers to broccoli," he says with a laugh. "We're losing consumers to the junk-food industry. They're spending multiple billions of dollars to win the hearts and minds of consumers."

And out of this realization grew the Eat 'Em Like Junk Food-themed campaign for baby carrots. Launched in September, the effort rips a page right out of the junk-food marketing manual, depicting baby carrots as full of attitude, and linking consumption of baby carrots to a wild and crazy lifestyle.

Extreme Measures
Visit babycarrots.com, and you'll hear the chant, "Baby. Carrots. Extreme!" over a heavy-metal soundtrack, and you'll see a teaser for Xtreme Xrunch Kart, a free, fully 3-D iPhone and iPad game (CP+B developed the game with Unit 9) that has players literally crunching baby carrots to propel an extreme sports dude in a rocket-powered shopping cart through a wild ride in the city. The more you crunch baby carrots into the microphone on your iPhone, the faster the shopping cart blasts through the animated world.

The extreme sports dude and his rocket-powered shopping cart also show up in live-action form in a television commercial that finds the daredevil racing down a mountain while a woman manning a machine gun blasts baby carrots at him. Another television commercial finds an oh-so-sexy woman sharing her love of baby carrots.

Reese believes the television spots capture the spirit of the campaign. "The television spots to me are a representation of the true cleverness and brilliance of the idea. They're meant to be a parody of junk-food advertising. Not only is it ridiculous to see carrots in that context, but at the end of the day, the spots are really making fun of the junk-food industry," Reese says. "It's meant for us to all say, 'It's really absurd how the junk-food industry has been marketing to us.'"

The baby carrots campaign also takes advantage of social media with a Facebook page and a presence on Twitter, where those naughty baby carrots dare to tease and taunt junk-food brands like Tostitos with tweets such as "@TostitosChips. Dip this." Another good one: "I spy something orange, crunchy, and addictive. (Don't you dare say @cheetos)."

Incidentally, Bolthouse Farms hasn't had any direct feedback from the junk-food companies in regard to the Eat 'Em Like Junk Food campaign, which is aimed at people of any age who wouldn't mind snacking on something healthful once in a while. "We don't expect too much backlash from that industry," Reese says. "In our opinion, we're on the right side of this argument, and I don't know that they want to engage us in that debate."

Farhang says it has been fun to leverage the phrase "junk food" in such a creative way, noting, "The junk-food industry is not really allowed to use the term junk food. Frito-Lay would never refer to their own product as junk food, and, in fact, there's probably a corporate policy against using those two words in the same sentence in their building."

Nice Package
In addition to creating a fully integrated advertising campaign promoting baby carrots, CP+B also gave baby carrots' packaging a makeover, placing the little veggies in colorful bags sold in school vending machines in test markets such as Syracuse and Cincinnati, as well as in a handful of retailers. Over Halloween, packages branding baby carrots as "Scarrots" were introduced.

The fresh packaging in particular is a smart way to drum up interest in an established food, according to npd Group analyst Harry Balzer, who has been studying Americans' eating patterns for three decades. Even though these are the same baby carrots we've been consuming for years, Balzer says the updated packaging "creates the impression that something new and different is happening with baby carrots."

Pamela Riemenschneider, editor of Produce Retailer magazine and self-described "produce nerd," lives in one of the Texas test markets where the baby carrots are being sold in the new packaging, and she says they caught her eye even before she'd heard about the campaign. "It's not like anything I've seen in this category before," Riemenschneider says, adding, "People in the produce industry are excited about what Bolthouse Farms is doing. This is new, going at it from the junk-food standpoint, and I think it's a great idea. If they can get the kinds of returns they're hoping to get, then it'll be interesting to see if others [in the produce business] follow."

Reese didn't have any sales data to present at press time, as the campaign only rolled out last September, but he notes that baby carrots sold through vending machines in schools are selling out even when they are placed right next to vending machines selling junk food.

And here's something else to munch on: "People tell us that the baby carrots in the new packaging taste better," Reese says. "Isn't that amazing?"