Out of the Box 2: The Market, Cornered
How a yoghurt quietly took over our supermarkets – and our lives.
Out of the Box is a meandering exploration of what surrounds our food; that is, the containers and packaging that it so often comes to us in. It’s a combination of text and audio posts and I’d like to say thanks to the paid subscribers who make this work possible! Find the first installment here.
The background was a magic eye; a repeating pattern of a spoonful of pink yoghurt with different coloured balls arranged on top. In WordArt type text it read ‘Core Memory Unlocking’, next to a Clip Art padlock. The ad, it turns out – which I was served repeatedly on Instagram while researching this piece – is to announce Müller bringing back a 90s flavour of their famous Corners: Mississippi Mud Pie Inspired.
The campaign has been produced for Müller by VCCP London, and according to them, the campaign “seeks to secure a new Gen Z fan base for the flavour, tapping into nostalgia to reinforce the “playfulness” of the brand.” I always find the idea of nostalgia as a marketing tool very interesting, but especially in this case, seeing as the later-born Gen Z-ers weren’t even born in the 90s. How do you sell a nostalgic food to a group of people who have never eaten it? By tapping into a wider cultural trend for the fashion and aesthetic of that era, I suppose, and using its language and markers to familiarise the unfamiliar.
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