• by Karlene Lukovitz  @KLmarketdaily, November 13, 2014

Kellogg Company is seeing backlash from some conservatives as a result of Frosted Flakes's recent sponsorship of a gay pride march in Atlanta and an ad that the brand ran in the Atlanta Pride Guide.

The ad (shown), headlined "Wear Your Stripes with Pride," features Frosted Flakes mascot Tony the Tiger and the message: "At Kellogg, we're an evolving culture that respects and accepts employees' sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression so that all employees can be authentic and fully engaged."

The ad also includes a seal indicating that gay rights nonprofit the Human Rights Campaign lists Kellogg as "one of the best places to work for LGBT equality." 

An image of the ad posted last Friday on the Facebook page of the American Family Association, a "traditional Christian values activist group," had drawn more than 1,000 shares, 500 likes and several hundred comments, including some calls for a Kellogg's boycott, by Monday, reports EdgeMediaNetwork.

"Many of the comments were highly critical of the company for using a cartoon character to promote homosexuality, while a number of other comments stated that Kellogg's has no place, as a food manufacturer, to weigh in on sexual preference," reported Christianpost.com. The site also quotes AFA research director Ed Vitagliano as saying that the group's policy "toward corporate America and companies that serve the public is that we ask them to remain neutral in this battle over same-sex marriage," and that AFA doesn't think that "cereals and cartoons should be bypassing parents to speak about moral issues to children without permission from parents."

As with previous instances relating to mainstream brand advertising that sympathetically portrays diverse families or proactively supports gay marriage — including General Mills's Cheerios TV spot featuring a biracial family — the Tony the Tiger sponsorship and ad elicited passionate approval from many on social media in counterpoint to the AFA's position.

On its Web site, Kellogg emphasizes its diversity policies as reflecting core corporate values: "At Kellogg Company, diversity and inclusion are not add-ons, extras or 'nice to haves.' They are central to who we are and what we do. It's vital for the long-term success of our business that our workforce be as diverse as the consumers who enjoy our products. Diversity helps to ensure that we understand and can deliver on what our consumers want. Diversity encourages the sharing of richer, broader ideas that can lead to breakthrough innovations."

General Mills has a similarly strong diversity policy ("At General Mills, diversity is both a value and a business strategy"), and its executives publicly opposed a proposed anti-gay-marriage amendment in Michigan, according to Christianpost. 

Cheerios' new ad campaign in Canada is explicitly themed to celebrating diverse families, including one ad that features  a gay couple and their adopted daughter.

"I'm not sure that neutrality is a real option for companies, much as some would probably like it to be," commented Kevin Coupe in Morning News Beat, his newsletter for the food industry. "I think that in the current environment, when issues involving social responsibility actually can have an impact on how people shop and transparency makes it critical that companies state their positions, companies actually have to say what they are for and what they are against. I also think it is a measure of how society is evolving that anti-gay rights activists now are hoping that companies will choose neutrality as their default position."

Coupe points out that Wikipedia currently shows 33 out of 50 states recognizing same-sex marriage, and more than 7,000 companies now offering same-sex spousal benefits.