Got Milk? Creative Branding from a Creative Brand Agency

You can brand anything. Be strategic and creative. Advice from one of the area’s creative brand agencies.

What could you say about milk? It was white and came in gallons. People felt they knew all there was to know about it, so it was hard to find a strategic platform.

The California Milk Advisory Board had for many years produced the “Milk Does a Body Good” ad campaign.

The campaign echoed the government’s nutrition program, which encouraged people to drink a few glasses of milk each day to maintain their health.

Consumers evidently still believed that milk was nutritious. Ninety-four percent of the people already said “milk was good for you.” The problem was that the old ads didn’t change consumers’ behavior.

Consumers and especially kids and teens still considered milk to be as boring as a beverage could possibly be.

On the contrary, people thought of soft drinks as recreational leisure products. Sodas, then, were in a great position to represent many of the things that milk did not.

Milk was boring. It had an image problem. Many consumers were no longer excited by the tamed, domestic life that milk conjured up (milk toast). Gatorade, Snapple, Mountain Dew, and Sprite were fun and alive. Even V-8!

Although milk sales were declining, research showed that 70% of the population claimed to drink milk frequently. It was quickly agreed that the best hope of reviving sales was to prod this 70% to increase their consumption.

Research showed that people who drank milk tended to think of it as an accompaniment to certain sweet and sticky foods that they loved like brownies, cookies, or peanut butter sandwiches.

The kicker though occurred when people were asked how they feel when they’re eating something that demanded milk to wash it down, but don’t have milk in the house?

Respondents placed in this situation were upset, they felt deprived. They were able to convey the feeling of having a brownie or cookie remnants stuck in their throat, calling out for a gulp of milk to cleanse the palette.

How then to market milk? A deprivation strategy - rather than selling milk as a complement to certain foods, instead the strategy became to remind milk drinkers of the anxiety and disappointment that came when milk wasn’t available at crucial moments.

Research also showed that 88% of milk was consumed in the home. Thus the new campaign would show people running out of milk when they needed it most, in their homes. The whole campaign was based on somebody sitting at home thirty feet from the fridge with the TV on. The goal: to have consumers feel the pain.

The new branding approach started with a TV spot featuring an American history buff obsessed with Aaron Burr -- stuffing a huge peanut butter sandwich into his mouth and listening to a classical music radio channel. The DJ announces a $10,000 trivia question, “Who shot Alexander Hamilton?”

The camera pans our hero’s apartment filled with scads of memorabilia from the famous duel, including a portrait of Burr and the actual bullet preserved in a glass curio. The phone rings. Mouth crammed with peanut butter and unable to respond, the pitiful history buff reaches for the milk only to find it empty. Desperate, he can only mutter “Aaaawon Buuuuhh.”

Got Milk? was born. 15 years later the rest is branding history.

Got ____?

Has become part of the lexicon.
Milk is cool in more ways than one.
Brilliant Branding made the difference.