Bacon Is The New Black: Why Positioning Works
The October 12th issue of Advertising Age was talking about why fast-food restaurants have gone hog wild over bacon. That, plus billboards for Wendy’s? Baconator? and the fact that McDonald’s? is now serving breakfast 24/7, got me to thinking. Is bacon the New Black?
It turns out that our regard for this cured pork treat has changed over the past three decades due to a concerted effort by American marketers. Once a staple of the hearty breakfast, bacon was nearly banished during the health-conscious 1980’s, until the Pork Marketing Board was successful in its efforts to position pork as “the other white meat.” This reframing created a reasonable alternative to the boneless, skinless chicken breast, itself a new product at the time.
But while pork chops were reinstated on the menu, sales for bacon declined. You might say the pork marketers were hog-tied. That is, until a subset from the food service industry sought to reposition bacon once again, this time as a flavor enhancer for restaurants. Bacon improves taste and mouthfeel at a very affordable cost. That’s taking product development off the blackboard and onto the bun! Other technical advancements in “precooked bacon technology” pushed pork ahead in the 1990s.
More recently there has been such steady demand for the product that the Chicago Mercantile Exchange's trade in contracts went pork-belly up, you might say, in 2012. The market had been a response to volatility that now no longer existed. In fact, a grocery industry website, Marketresearch.com, reports that bacon sales in the U.S. are still growing about 10% per year.
The Huffington Post claims the average American consumes 18 pounds of bacon annually, or about 44,000 calories. The Internet boasts bacon recipes, bacon accessories, I (Heart) Bacon apparel, even videos of bacon roses for Valentine’s Day.
But just days ago, the World Health Organization cited processed meats, including bacon, as a possible cause of colorectal cancer. How will content marketers for the pork industry react to this news? Living in a world where hot food trends range from kale to cupcakes, will they try to persuade me and my fellow citizens to make sensible choices? Or recruit a fictional beauty to do what Carrie Bradshaw did for cupcakes? Perhaps Big Pork will latch onto retro trends that harken back to a more comforting time. I'm seeing Don Draper drinking his bourbon with a side of bacon...
P.S. If you’re hankering for a lengthy treatise on the history of pork merchandising (and who isn’t?), I’d recommend Bloomberg Business’s excellent post on why “The Bacon Boom Was Not An Accident,” starring such characters as Joe “Bacon Belly” Leathers of Hormel and the heroic pork belly traders of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.