Friends With Benefits: A Social Media Marketing Handbook

Staying Connected Among the Cookie Lovers?

I’m about a month late on this, but I wanted to comment on this curious move by cookie-makers Pepperidge Farm to launch ArtoftheCookie.com, a website dedicated to their cookies and, uh, maintaining connections among women. From the New York Times article on the campaign’s launch, a Pepperidge Farm VP comments on the site’s goals:

During those conversations, “this notion of connection came up again and again,” he added, and how “hectic lifestyles, life in general, has gotten in the way” of women forging and strengthening ties with friends — over, say, a pot of tea and a plate of cookies.

Elsewhere, he remarks that the company is moving “to two-way marketing from one-way marketing”.

At first I thought they’d actually launched a social network. That would’ve been a dumb move, but it’d be more exciting than what they’ve got here. They give ridiculous lip service to “connecting” and “two-way marketing” and yet the only way to interact with their website is to “join the email list”. Er, 2001 called, and it wants its web marketing campaign back.

Here’s are a couple more examples of just how one-way the site actually is: there’s no associated Facebook campaign, and there are remarkably few outgoing links on the site (their stay-connected page features seven web-based strategies for keeping in touch, but doesn’t link to a single external resource).

I’m guessing their ‘ethnographic research’ indicated that their customers, in fact, just like to eat their cookies, and that the whole ‘connection’ thing was devised by an overly-zealous marketing squad with delusions of grandeur. Everybody can pat each other on the back around the board room table, but why would actual normal human customers visit this website?

I’m a little disappointed in the Times, too, for writing such an uncritical piece about the campaign. Writer Stuart Elliot might have located an Pepperidge Farm customer (or even a user of the site) with whom to talk.

Tags: cookies, marketing, not social media, pepperidge farm, website