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Over the past five years, brands have landed on a voice you probably know well. A human-like—sometimes sarcastic—brand voice designed to speak the language of a younger, hyper-online consumer.
Duolingo’s mascot has a crush on Dua Lipa; Ryanair doesn’t have time for your BS; meanwhile, chicken sandwich brands spent all of 2019 fighting in each other’s comment sections. That sort of thing.
It’s flippant and pithy—definitely not your mother’s corporation! Buy our stuff! A few years later, that marketing approach is feeling a bit stale. Some might even say it is dead. We all know there’s a whole marketing department stacked up in that trenchcoat. And so it seems Nutter Butter has pushed forward a new approach.
Nutter Butter, the cookie no one has thought much about recently, has risen from the dead. Rather than posing as a sarcastic human, it’s now a terrifying specter with a TikTok account that’s set on haunting us with unsettling videos. Nutter Butter’s videos don’t sell us on the product directly. It’s hard to see any of them leading to direct conversions. Rather, the product becomes the main character, and I for one hope that little cookie is doing okay. Nutter Butter is rotting our brains and changing CPG branding before our very eyes.
And this approach is playing out well. The brand’s TikTok account has gotten major pickup over the past couple days for its surrealist approach to marketing. If Gen Z’s aesthetic is authentic anti-design, conveyed through stickers, comic sans, and unedited model photos, Nutter Butter appears to be pushing the anti-design aesthetic one step further. Its visual approach is straight up antagonistic.
It doesn’t create any sense of product appeal, which is the opposite of what ads are historically supposed to do. Its Twitter account is non-nonsensical. But it’s working in terms of engagement. As of this writing, its TikTok account has more than 600,000 followers. Its top videos have more than 2 million views. And its top comments get tens of thousands likes.
The anti-marketing approach
There are a few other brands taking a similarly unhinged approach. Sour Patch Kids, which is owned by the same parent company as Nutter Butter, is nearly as chaotic. Telletubbies doesn’t appear to sell anything, but its TikTok plays up their inherent creepy-cuteness to the tune of 1.5 million followers. Together, they seem to signal what the next phase of online marketing looks like, especially on TikTok.
But Nutter Butter is perhaps the most haunted. In one video, the cookie appears dripping over a playground that’s on fire, like Salvador Dalí’s clock; in another, a young woman asks, “Nutter Butter, are you guys okay?” and two Nutter Butter cookies with composite faces seemingly seared into them move up and down in tandem with a rainbow “Yes” dancing above them. In another, a Nutter Butter appears throughout a doll house smeared with peanut butter. It’s jarringly lit. “AI could never recreate this,” one person commented on the Dalí-esque video.
On a video with 9.1 million views that discussed Nutter Butter’s account, one person wrote, “I hadn’t thought about Nutter Butter in 20 years, they did exactly what they came here to do.” That comment alone got 141, 000 likes.
The brain-rotification of CPG marketing
Last October, The New York Times published a piece called “If Every Brand Is Funny Online, Is Anything Funny?” The piece described the brand voice put-on as a race to the bottom, in which brands get ever more sarcastic and pithy to stand out. Once it’s named, it’s dead—a notion that Nutter Butter has seemingly embraced.
In place of sarcasm, Nutter Butter has embraced a new flavor of shock marketing. Perhaps one of the few ways to get people to stop scrolling is to convince them they took a wrong turn. This niche approach likely only works for brands that have a young target audience and lots of room to play; playing up internet culture with a dark approach to smooth brain aesthetics (if you’re their target audience, you’ll get this).
Our brains are already pretty rotted from all that time spent on our phones anyway. As one colleague put it, this is the “brain-rotification of CPG marketing.” TikTok is an entertainment platform, after all. Are you not entertained?
We reached out to Nutter Butter, but the company did not provide comment by the time of publication.
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