Naturally-junk food. The emotional construction of the Baby carrot’s brand. The product whose semiotic virtues I want to expose with this short paper is “Baby Carrots”, a new “fast-good” sensation recently launched in the US market by Bolthouse farm and the advertising agency Crispin Porter Bogusky.
As Roland Bathes stated, food can be compared to language and just like a sentence must respect a certain order to be considered meaningful, in the same way a menu starting with appetizers and ending with puddings is considered to be logically correct, but not the other way round. The fascinating aspect of Baby carrots is exactly its non-correctness on a conceptual and semiotic level: a natural food presented to the public as if it was another brand of crisps or any other category of greasy and unhealthy junk food. The aim of the campaign is to present a simple, natural vegetable as “sexy” and “cool” to youngsters. But within a wider scope the aim of this marketing effort is even more challenging: introducing a brand new way of consuming natural food. The core of the $25 million campaign is BabyCarrots.com, where users can download the game, watch the webisodes, view commercials, and examine the new packaging which is deliberately shaped like a bag of crisps. In the background, a chorus of voices chants "Baby! Carrots! Extreme!" over an epicsounding heavy metal riff. Natural vs Cultural In our society we tend to idealize natural ingredients and products, but what does exactly “natural” really mean today? We could think of “traditional food”, “exotic food”, “organic food”, “bio-food”, all as natural products. It is therefore not clear what natural food really means and essentially, we can only think of this concept by referring to its contrary: industrial, processed (or “cultural”) food. The aim of the Baby carrots campaign seems to be taking this contrast to the extreme by using a semiotic camouflage that focuses on the communication itself (brand autoreferentiality) rather than on the product. It could be
labbelled as self-aware advertising, satirizing the tropes other brands use seriously. The insight of the campaign seems to be that carrots are one of the most “utopic” natural products and there is no further need to inform consumers about their good virtues. They already know that carrots are healthy and natural. What they don’t know is that carrots could be as cool and “sexy” as junk food (one of the three commercials shows a young and attractive lady biting her crunchy carrots - this is the commercial associated with the “chic”junk food packaging). Diet vs exception Our society is obsessed with the concept of dieting, and diet has become the rule to follow, even if it tends to deny our subjectivity we must stick to the plan: “one apple a day keeps the doctor away”. On the contrary junk food is perceived as the exception to the rule, the little self-indulgent moment that we can all treat ourselves to once in a while (in most cases). Baby carrots aims at reversing the common rule in both ways, by depicting diet food as sexy and desirable, your new little self-indulgent moment, and by applying the fast-food way of consuming to a natural and very traditional product.
junk food
bio food
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The tone The brand’s tag line with its conative function, “Eat ‘em like junk food” immediately sets the narrative tone and provides the readers/consumers with all the information that they need to experience the product. It is evident that the brand’s communication makes heavy use of post-modern irony in the same fashion as Crisping Porter Bogusky did with Burger King’s “whopper sacrifice” or “whopper freakout” campaigns and for the anti-tobacco “Truth” campaign back in 2001.
What’s more, Baby Carrots’ communication is reminiscent of the anti-tobacco “Truth” campaign, an effort to prevent smoking among youngsters back in 2001 where humour and a young and dynamic tone needed to be a part of the execution. The packaging Another interesting feature of the baby carrots brand is that it comes with three different packagings, each one representing a different fictional imaginary. The interesting aspect of this multiprospective approach is that all three packagings and all three imaginaries (science fiction-extreme stuntssexy and chic) aim to reach a young-male audience. The common theme of the three commercials is actually the young red-haired lady. This choice reflects the overall marketing strategy of positioning the product in a brand new niche that had not previously been exploited.