Kraft Macaroni and Cheese has kicked off a new brand platform and campaign aimed to celebrate comfort food just in time for fall weather.
The “Help Yourself” effort, developed in conjunction with creative agency Johannes Leonardo, is aims to overcome the stigma around comfort by encouraging people to embrace things that bring comfort.
“Kraft Macaroni & Cheese has a singular ambition: to celebrate the ubiquity of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese as a familiar comfort for all,” said Matt Carpenter, General Manager, Quick Prep Meals at The Kraft Heinz Company. “There’s a desire to lean into the brand’s leadership status as America’s original comfort food, with a bolder, more emotionally resonant brand positioning to amplify our relevance with the broadest possible customer base.”
“As part of the strategic process, we worked with Waterson Garner to interview many consumers and food experts over many months to get a sense of how the way America eats is changing, the role comfort and comfort food plays in everyday life and perceptions of mac and cheese as a dish and a cultural phenomenon,” Carpenter continued. “Then, working closely with the team at Johannes Leonardo, we developed our new brand purpose ‘to inspire the positive power of comfort’ and our launch campaign ‘Help Yourself’, which plays against the stigma that seeking comfort is bad for you.”
While Kraft Mac & Cheese traditionally targets families with children, their new “Help Yourself” brand platform expands beyond this demographic to include a wider range of consumers. As part of this shift, the company is focusing more on the emotion than on the product itself in the marketing.
“We want to continue to foster the love that many millions of Americans have for the delicious blue box, but also modernize and create fresh cultural relevance for a new generation of consumers,” Carpenter said. “In particular, we want our evolved brand to position Kraft Macaroni & Cheese as good, wholesome food for everyone, rather than just an occasional treat for kids. We’re eaten by people of all ages, stages and backgrounds, and we want to better embrace this in how the brand shows up.”
The new campaign will be featured on TV, OTT, as well as social channels including the brand’s first foray into TikTok. The brand has created the #SkipChallenge, calling on consumers to show us how Kraft Mac & Cheese makes them feel.
“We’re leveraging social platforms like TikTok to encourage others to create content and fuel creativity through our #SkipChallenge where we will ask consumers to duet the Skip spot and show us how Kraft Macaroni & Cheese makes you feel,” Carpenter said. “We’re continuing to see how engaged consumers are with social media right now, which is why social is key for this campaign. Recent Kraft Macaroni & Cheese TikTok content resulted in more click throughs than ANY in-feed creative TikTok has seen to date.”
Kraft sells about one million boxes of Mac & Cheese a day and this effort drops just ahead of the Thanksgiving holiday, a time when consumers are eating more comfort foods.
“There has never been a better time to reassess the role of comfort and comfort food in our holistic wellbeing, especially as self-care and being kind to ourselves experience a much-needed renaissance,” Carpenter said. “And as one of America’s most iconic comfort foods, we have full license to drive this new conversation around comfort, inviting people everywhere to “help themselves” more often.”
