The Great Pickle Conspiracy
A Victimless Crime? Not even close
There’s nothing like a family vacation at your favorite beach. You rent a house or condo as close to the water as you can find and settle in for a week of relaxing on the sand, playing in the water, golf, and family time.
Enjoying local seafood restaurants is also a big part of the equation, but eating out every day gets expensive, and the crowds can be frustrating. So, you draw straws on the first day of vacation to see who has to go grocery shopping.
A simple grocery store trip to get supplies for the week can be a daunting task. You know the best strategy is to keep it simple: sandwiches, hamburgers, and hot dogs. You’re anxious to get your vacation started, just like the seemingly hundreds of other people crammed around the deli meat counter.
Once you finally get your 3 pounds of turkey, you deftly maneuver your way around the store grabbing hamburger meat, hot dogs, buns and bread, and an assortment of chips and cookies. Lucky for you, all the finishing touches you need to make your home-prepared meals complete (ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise…and pickles) are all conveniently located together on the condiment aisle.
Miraculously, even after a 15-minute wait in the check-out line watching a family with 5 kids (at least) in front of you fighting over which pool noodle to buy, you get the entire trip done in under an hour. You feel pretty good about that. But should you?
Compromising Quality in the Name of Convenience
Let’s face it—our society is no stranger to compromising quality in the name of convenience. Look no further than the packages of pre-cooked bacon. Sure, just popping those little bacon pouches in the microwave is super-easy and they still taste like bacon.
But you’re missing the experience of waiting for a skillet to heat, grease popping everywhere (including on your arm), waking up the whole house with the strong aroma of hickory bacon (that typically hangs around for a couple of days), and then briefly struggling with the proper way to dispose of a skillet full of used grease before just pouring it down the garbage disposal and hoping for the best. You’re only robbing yourself.
Perhaps you’ve noticed that pickles are usually kept in 2 locations at the grocery store. While shelves full of pickles in all shapes and flavors (spears, ovals, chips, “sandwich stuffers,” bread & butter, gherkins, stackers, etc.) are there for the taking on the condiment aisle, waiting to be scooped up along with all the other necessities required to make it through a week of lunches, there is a much smaller, humbler, less-diverse collection of pickles displayed on a single refrigerated shelf (often not far from the real bacon).
What’s going on with this lonely band of fermented troubadours?
Like many Americans, I never thought about these randomly placed pickles. I just raked the name brands on the condiment aisle into my shopping cart and moved on…until my daughter insisted we get a jar of Claussen pickles for our lunches during our week at the beach last summer.
She said they were better than typical pickles—fresher, crunchier, and tastier (this is one of the many things she learned at college). Long story short (too late), our family of 5 opened the Claussen pickles for lunch on the first day of our vacation and polished off the entire jar in one sitting.
Was that the power of suggestion, or was it science?
The pickles were definitely crunchier. I mean the noise from all of us chomping was deafening. Apparently, those pickles in the refrigerated section taste different (perhaps better) because they are fermented instead of heat-processed. That process is also why they must remain refrigerated…and less convenient.
But this article is not about pickle recipes. I don’t really know much at all about pickles. I just found the above article by googling “why do Claussen pickles taste good.”
I do know a little about Marketing, and I am starting to find pickles fascinating. I work in a Marketing agency today. I started my career in Sales and Sales Management. For about 10 years in between, I was able to work in Product Marketing for a rapidly growing technology company, and it basically changed the way I see all products and Marketing campaigns.
Product Marketers occupy a place in an organization in between product development (engineers and coders in technology companies…maybe it’s chemists when it comes to pickles?) and the customers. A Product Marketing Manager researches the market, understands the customer’s problems and goals, guides the product development team to create products that will sell, and then crafts the messaging and positioning to drive Marketing programs.
How do you set your company apart?
As I gaze at the shelves of pickles in the condiment aisle, I imagine what happened in a pickle boardroom back in the 1950s.
Sleeves are rolled up. Easels are everywhere. Stale coffee is sitting around.
It’s almost time to break out the bourbon, when a Pickle Product Manager snuffs out his cigarette to say, “Fellas, we’re thinking about it all wrong. We don’t need to make better-tasting pickles. Let’s just heat the pickles up before we put them in jars, so we can put them on the condiment aisle next to the mustard. We’ll sell a ton more, and people won’t care. They’re just pickles.”
What makes your product or service different? What do you do better than your competitors? What is your distinctive competence?
At Active8, that’s where we start when we begin working with a new client (actually even before we start work). We want to know what sets you apart. Why do your customers buy your product? Sometimes, we even help our clients figure this out. Once we know your distinctive competence, we work with you to explain that value to your target audiences in memorable and impactful ways. When it all comes together, it’s magic.
It’s not always straightforward. The pickle industry, like many industries, is a great Marketing laboratory with knobs and controls being adjusted to increase revenues, profits, and brand loyalty.
It’s not just about taste or even quality. The pickle Marketers of today are considering our preferences for convenience, portion size, pickle shapes and flavors, and price. They know how we behave and what we’ll accept. Maybe we’re accepting an inferior pickle experience because they know we’re too lazy or rushed to go hunting for the pickle we deserve.
Maybe this outrages you! Why doesn’t Claussen and their lonely little group of other fermented pickle providers band together and create a huge education campaign about pickle process (I’m picturing the old “beef, it’s what’s for dinner” campaign with James Garner working the backyard grill like a hoss).
We Can Learn A Lot from the Pickle Industry
The world needs to know where the good pickles are. Quit suffering in obscurity, hidden on a remote shelf tucked behind the Lunchables.
We’ve not seen a big pickle education campaign. And we probably never will. Claussen enjoys about an 80% market share among refrigerated pickles. That’s dominant, but the refrigerated pickle market is only a fraction of the size of the “shelf-stable market.”
But guess what? Claussen is owned by the Kraft Heinz Company, which also is the 3rd largest seller of shelf-stable pickles. They’re playing both sides of this, so why educate us on how to choose the best pickles?
Even though I’ve written a lot here, I really don’t know much about pickles. Honestly, my interest is less about taste and more about admiring the cleverness of a market strategy built mostly around placing a seemingly inferior product right in front of us at just the right time, when we’re also buying mustard and ketchup.
However, I do encourage you to look around for that obscure refrigerated shelf in your grocery store and give a fermented pickle a try. You may like it better, but the other ones are pretty good too. It’s just pickles.
