Perdue Farms’ chief marketing officer David Zucker knows that in an era of food recalls, consumers want to trust the chicken they buy. They want it to be high quality and safe.
So first and foremost, the brand’s long-term vision is to be the most trusted name in food and agriculture.
“That’s a big statement,” says Zucker. “Trust is a really big word. As a consumer you want to trust that the food you eat is safe. There are well-known consumer brands that are out there with recalls because of what appears to be a lack of a food safety protocol or diligence around it. So as a marketing person, I’m trying to communicate that Purdue is a product that when you ultimately purchase it, you can trust it.”
In addition to food safety, taste is another big part of Perdue’s marketing messaging. Afterall, consumers buy chicken to eat it and they want it to taste good.
“Consumers want trust and they want to taste. What I’m trying to communicate to them is not only are you going to get that, but how Perdue differentiates. We differentiate because everything that we do adds up to a great tasting chicken,” adds Zucker.
To get the message across, the brand is running campaigns across the funnel of advertising. Notably, the company has increased its spend in online video and connected TV over the last few years.
“We do things that other other companies don’t do. The creative that we develop, whether it’s visual creative that would go on something like our social channels or television or it’s in something that sits in the case, the message that the consumer gets is that you can trust the product and it’s going to be tasty,” he continues.
Prior to joining Perdue almost six years ago, Zucker held leadership roles at Omaha Steaks, Gilt Groupe and Dell. Brand Innovators caught up with Zucker from his office in Maryland to discuss building trust, retail media networks & helping shoppers figure out what to cook. This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Can you talk about your approach to marketing?
It depends on what part of the funnel you are in. When it’s in a broad reach part of the funnel, we’re typically creating :15-:30 video communications for television or social media. Those are broad capture messages that we want to resonate with you at a really broad and wide level. You’re not thinking about anything. You’re watching television and all of a sudden an ad comes across. We want that message to resonate and to be memorable. We want you to remember Perdue and taste so as you get closer to the case, you have that in the back of your head, Perdue and taste.
When you are grocery shopping, you’re more concerned about something very specific like, “I’m making dinner tonight, What am I going to use?” Is it the chicken breast or the chicken thigh or chicken nuggets or strips that are in the prepared and the frozen aisle? The communication is going to have to be less about, “Hey, it’s Perdue. It tastes good.” It’s more about solving a problem that you’re worried about. It’s going to be quick. Can I use it in an air fryer or is it barbecue flavor, because that’s what you’re looking for. Marketing translates from broad reach advertising to the actual packaging itself.
In what ways are you approaching storytelling to make it memorable?
The storytelling depends again on where you are in the purchase fund. In the broad reach advertising storytelling is going to be fast. We want it to be a breakthrough. We want it to be very relevant to our target audience. We do a great deal of testing and ideation to figure out what is working or how to adjust it.
As we get through the case, the messaging, the creative itself, the storytelling part of it is going to use components that thread through the creative development. It could be the colors, it could be the terminology, it could be the characters we’re using, like the Perdue family, it could be the tone we’re taking. Ultimately we want to be able to put all the creative up at the same time, whether it’s broad reach media all the way through the funnel down to what’s happening at the case, not only in visual, but in tone. We are trying to communicate that we are not a large agricultural company that is just around profit.
We had a huge advertising campaign last year, after finding out that our largest competitor Tyson went back to using antibiotics in their chicken specifically for profit. We came out and said in a very large and loud way that we are committed to not using antibiotics because it’s better for the environment, better for the chicken and better for the consumer. It’s not around profit. We know how to produce chickens in a really clean way so that we don’t need antibiotics. That’s a really important message that we spent tens of millions of dollars in advertising on getting that communication across to the consumer.
You mentioned mom. Is she the core audience?
Our target audience is women between 30 and 45. That could be a busy working mom. It could be a single mom. It could be dad. But all of our data still shows that mom is still a major decision maker in the house when it comes to food. Not that dad isn’t, but just that mom is the majority and so we tend to try and talk more to her.
How are you working with retail partners at the point of purchase?
We do things in the store as it’s allowed. Certain retailers like Walmart are a little more restrictive in what you can do in the case. We do a great deal of digital advertising with most of our retailers using click-and-collect. With their advent of retail media networks, search has become the biggest component of communication that we use, primarily because it pays back. Most of the retailers are still struggling and trying to figure out how display works in their digital environments and why it’s an important part of the media mix. We tend to rely more on search than we do on display.
Can you talk about marketing during inflation when prices are going up?
We have a campaign that launched last year that is still out there now, which is very much around basically being a helper to mom. It’s about the fact that even though kids do crazy things, you as a mom still deserve to give your kids the best tasting chicken. That’s really in the problem solving realm. That’s the one that we’re continuing for the foreseeable future. It is on the air and we do trade promotions with retailers.
When Covid happened and everybody was raising their prices, we didn’t raise our price as much as everybody else. We were significantly behind the pace of raising prices there than our competitors were so when they started bringing them down, we didn’t have to because we didn’t raise them as much. We’re still very much in that sequence of events. We feel we’re on the good end of it.
I imagine that recipes are probably a big thing for your brand, helping consumers with ideas of what to cook.
Yes. The most searched recipe on our website is fried chicken and people love it. It’s about taste. People are always looking for something that’s quick that can taste good and we have hundreds of recipes that fit that profile.
When they come to our site, they’re looking for three things – general information around the brand, specific information around a product or they’re looking to understand where to get the products that we sell. We optimize our website behavior to those three profiles. The UX, the end user experience is aligned toward those three profiles.
