Rethinking Milk Marketing

Last week I wrote about how Got milk? is the most over-rated ad campaign of all time through the perspective of achieving commercial results.

Spoiler: milk sales dived during the time it ran (and after).

Milk needed a repositioning in the 90s. What it got was a famous ad that re-affirmed its existing (weakening) Positioning.

This got me wondering. How is milk being promoted nowadays?

I took a sneak peek.

As you’d expect, it’s very different in the era of Gen Z, alt milks, and protein pre-occupied consumers.

The California Milk Processing Board, who with ad agency GS&P devised the original Got milk? campaign, has been pursuing a ‘it’s the real thing’ strategy in the face of increasing alt milk adoption.

The tagline is "Everyone wants to be milk these days”.

Interesting!

But, let’s park that to one side for the mooment and instead focus on MilkPEP (the Milk Processor Education Program).

MilkPEP plays a more significant role in the promotion of milk. The main role.

The program exists to increase dairy milk consumption through category-level consumer marketing nationally (not just one state).

Whereas The California Milk Processing Board has a marketing budget of around $23m, MilkPEP’s is over $80m.

They’re the real moo-ver and milk-shaker.

Over the last few years, MilkPEP has initiated a radical shake-up of its communication program.

Main difference: milk moustaches and milk life are out and nutritional benefits are in. And yes, Got milk? made a comeback.

Notably, MilkPEP partnered with Gale to reposition milk as a performance drink.

Over the last few years, they’ve executed a bunch of activations along the theme of sports and nutrition — including OOH, paid social, programmatic, influencers, real world stunts, and sponsored sports events.

To get more detail on the activations, head here. Also worth checking out this Snapchat activation.

Here’s a flavour:

A consumer facing website was launched to support the ‘You’re Gonna Need Milk For That’ messaging: gonnaneedmilk.com.

As you can glean from the below screen grabs, it highlight’s milk’s nutritional benefits and positions milk against alt milks with benefit breakdowns.

Gale’s website shares the strategic thinking behind this approach:

There’s also been an activation to mock alt milk drinks — Wood Milk.

It’s pretty funny and worth a watch!

These activations collectively got widespread national exposure. Gale reports that Wood Milk got 77m views across social media alone. Sweet.

The rub

The messaging and creativity with these activations is fab. Superbly executed.

However, my main concern is what the messaging is articulating. In other words: Positioning.

Why?

Positioning exists in the mind of the prospect. In this case, the existing or yet-to-be milk imbiber.

This means you have to think through milk’s competitive position from a customer perception perspective in a radical way.

One aspect is key: to recognise and accept the mental positions and perceptions of competitive alternatives that are already are present in the minds of prospects.

If the objective is to establish a new perception in the minds of prospects (reposition milk), you have to successfully relate to the perceptions that already are present there. This includes existing perceptions of milk.

In order to build a strong Positioning, the chosen strategy should concentrate on a radically differentiated perception — a compelling unique idea that only milk can claim versus its competitive alternatives.

In other words: what mobilising benefit can a prospect get from milk that they cannot get from anything else? Not even a little bit.

This differentiated perception should attack a weakness in the strength of milk’s competitive alternatives, and focus all forces on attacking precisely at that point.

In this regard, the recent MilkPEP + Gale activations fall short.

How so?

The campaigns play into the strengths of milk’s competitive alternatives with messaging that focusses on commoditised functional outcomes: “hydrates better than water” and “milks protein helps you recover”.

Sports and supplement drinks, in particular, are already known for their hydration, recovery, and strength building attributes. This kind of messaging puts milk head-to-head with them.

In the prospect’s mind, it’s like taking the fight to the home turf of sports drinks (where they have the high-ground and superior forces). This space is already occupied. Inside the prospect’s mental box for performance drinks is sports drinks.

A way to test how differentiated an ad campaign is in terms of its messaging, is to mentally swap out the product for a competitive alternative.

As an example, let’s revisit the below ad. If you were to swap out ‘milk’ for ‘Gatorade’ and ‘Got milk?’ for ‘Got Gatorade?’ it would still work.

Therefore, it’s not communicating a differentiated perception about milk. It’s not building a unique position in the mind.

That being said, milk’s unique experiential attributes will help to carve out and claim some ground with those that prefer those attributes (e.g. taste and texture) versus sports drinks. But, it’s an unfair fight.

In this context, milk is a ‘me too’ proposition competing in a ‘better war’ at a disadvantage. Even if milk does scientifically hydrate better and provide more protein to certain other beverages, will prospects perceive it that way? And, is this true of all of milk’s competitive alternatives?

There will always be a competitive alternative that claims better outcomes in every domain and attribute that milk has. And, the range of competing options are always much broader than most people consider.

In the dimension of functional performance benefits, milk isn’t just competing against drinks its also competing against meals and snacks.

As Al Ries and Jack Trout used to say: “You can’t win by being right”.

Further, I would also question to what extent dunking on alt milks (e.g. with Wood Milk) creates net new demand for milk. Sure, it’s hilarious, but does it instil buying behaviour?

Introspectively, for those that drink milk and prefer milk to alt milks (like me), it re-affirms my perception but doesn’t mean I am going to buy more milk.

For those that drink and prefer alt milk (often for health reasons), is this a convincing narrative to buy more milk instead?

If anything, it re-affirms the differentiated perception of alt milk and the perceived set of emotional benefits that go along with subscribing to the idea — playing into its strength.

If it were the 1950s, it’s sort of like jocks mocking greasers.

That being said, I appreciate the political motivations for doing this (raising awareness of a the ‘alt milk issue’ with the government).

The direction

I get the business logic behind why the ‘make sports drinks the enemy’ strategic direction was chosen.

First of all, this category of drinks is an area of growth (whereas milk is declining). Secondly, milk contains functional nutrients and properties that on a logical level enable it to compete competitively with sports drinks and other performance-based alternatives.

Except, people don’t perceive and behave purely logically. Uniqueness and relational distinctiveness are more noticeable and resonating.

You imprint into the mind with differentiation. By leveraging the biases and existing perceptions relating to the milk category against competing categories as a strength.

In Positioning theory, if you declare an enemy (i.e. sports drinks) it should be crystal clear what you offer that the enemy does not. This is most obvious when the articulated differentiation is the diametric opposite of the enemy.

Again, it seems to be missing from the execution.

This really comes to the heart of the matter: milk is its own category.

It should flex this.

Milk has a strong set of perceptions associated with it that none of its competitive alternatives can make as competitive claims.

Some of these are enabling and some are disabling as purchase motivators.

This is good. Leaning into the enabling motivators will make milk more distinctive. And, some of the disabling motivators can be reframed to support the enabling motivators under a compelling Positioning idea.

The key element here is to divide the mind between milk and everything else.

So there’s ‘no choice’ but milk for certain net new use cases and contexts (to increase demand).

Conversely, a strategy that presents milk as a choice (as is the case now) undermines and commoditises its perception.

But, where do you start?

Milk has so many emotional and functional benefits that it's almost a hindrance when trying to position it -- which do you pick!?

Well, you don’t necessarily have to pick any of them. You could pick an abstract idea that enlists functional attributes as supporting benefits (like a halo effect).

This idea would leverage the powerful existing perception(s) of milk to make a unique competitive claim that zero of milk's competitive alternatives can make.

To be more milk.

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