• by Sarah Mahoney  @mahoney_sarah, August 26, 2024

 
While Applegate, the country’s top natural and organic meat brand, went quiet on brand campaigns back in 2019, it never stopped listening. After five years of digesting the massive changes COVID, inflation, and all those documentaries had on meat consumers, the Hormel-owned company is back with a new brand effort, working with BarkleyOKRP on its messages about responsible farming. Joe O’Connor, president of the Bedminster, New Jersey-based brand, tells Marketing Daily what’s behind the new campaign.

Interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Marketing Daily: You’ve been out of brand advertising since 2019. Why this campaign, and why now?

Joe O’Connor: Our brand continues to evolve and grow, and we’ve identified an opportunity for us to both talk to our existing consumers and attract new households. We’ve found this large segment of consumers that are either in our space or in surrounding categories. Maybe they’ve not been buying natural or organic products, or maybe they are but not buying Applegate.

We’re a pretty humble company and haven’t always been the best at telling our story. We began working with Barkley OKRP, asking, “What does it look like to be a model farmer?” The agency came up with this tongue-in-cheek “Model Farmer” approach.

Marketing Daily: Another company might have used sincere ads to show what you mean by model farming practices and responsible sustainability, with smiling cows and happy pigs. Yet you’ve chosen this tongue-in-cheek approach, with a hunky male model. And you’re also using new channels, like Snap and Reddit. Why?

O’Connor: We’ve kept up with our social listening and had a lot of success with our influencer campaigns. Our consumers are very knowledgeable about food, and we saw this as an opportunity to put together this whole platform. We want to be where our consumers are, so we’re dabbling in Snap with a Snapchat game that lets people cook up their model meal. We can perhaps reach a different consumer base, including more millennials and Gen Z. We want people to find our brand to be a little more interactive.

Marketing Daily: What are your Gen Z target customers like?

O’Connor: We’ve been around for 37 years, and their parents raised them on our brand. They’re always on their phones, and as they start their own families, they become more educated. They respect mission-based companies.

For example, we’ve made it a goal that our whole hot dog portfolio will be made from 100% certified regenerative beef by the end of next year. These are big commitments. They believe in our core tenets: healthy planet, healthy you, healthy animals. We just have to find more ways to reach them.

Marketing Daily: How did target audiences get so knowledgeable about meat farming? Most of us are squeamish and don’t like to think much beyond the styrofoam. Butchering is kind of a grim subject.

O’Connor:  Our customers know what they're buying. The pandemic led to a lot of consumer education. They were reading. They watched documentaries like “Kiss the Ground” on Netflix. They spent more time cooking and thinking about the food supply chain. They started to ask, more often, “Where does my food come from?” and “What are the most sustainable farming practices?”

That’s had positive outcomes for our brand, in terms of distribution and sales. We used to have a niche in stores, or maybe two feet of a shelf.

Marketing Daily: What about food costs? Inflation has had so much influence -- are consumers more frequently asking, “Wait, what am I paying for here?” Your products typically cost 30% to 40% more than conventionally raised meat, right?

O’Connor: Yes, in that range, depending on the product. We talk about why that gap exists. We’re using sustainable farming practices, raising animals to our standard. Let’s take poultry. We’re all veg-fed, and that costs more. Think about barn sizes. Our barns are smaller, so chickens and turkeys have more room to roam.

Marketing Daily: Who do you see as your main competitors?

O’Connor: We’re in 15 categories, which I’m so proud of, and it depends. On the frozen side, it could be Tyson or Perdue. It might be Oscar Mayer or Hormel, our parent company, if it's bacon.

Marketing Daily: Like your founder, I am a conflicted carnivore. I buy some organic meat but plenty of conventionally raised stuff, too, because it’s cheaper. I buy local farm-raised sometimes, too. In other words, I’m inconsistent. Is that typical?

O’Connor: A Whole Foods Markets customer is probably purer and shops there because that retailer has such firmly established policies about suppliers. But yes, most shoppers don’t want to think too much about meat.

Our position at Applegate is that there is only one bad day for our animals. We try and treat them humanely. We were founded on the “no antibiotics ever” promise. People are increasingly aware of superbugs and the impact of antibiotics. This campaign will remind them and reach others who are less aware. We’re not dedicated just to changing the meat people eat -- but the entire food system.