For a recent masterclass in PR misdirection, check out last week's release of Jaffa Lumps by the Pascall confectionery company. Owner Cadbury has been fucking up its brand in NZ for years now - changing beloved recipes, dropping long-held traditional sweets and shoveling production off overseas. But none of that mattered last week when the Jaffa Lumps came out.
It's an obvious and easy product for the company to put out - fusing two delights together is the current go-to, easy idea that is being exploited all over the place, (even though it is much harder to get the right mix than it looks, as recently experienced Whittakers and their ill-fated K Bar chocolate experiment).
After dodgy ideas like mixing L&P with your Toffee Pops, combing two distinctly Kiwi products like Jaffas and Pineapple Lumps is an easy win and got lots of attention. Social media was saturated in the new sweet treats, and that got enough people talking about it for it to spill over into big media, although most of their coverage consisted of 'reviews', which saw a newsroom stuffing some into their gob and making the awesome observation that they tasted a bit like orange chocolate chip ice cream.
Cadbury must have been stoked by the immediate reaction, especially when supermarkets ran out of the new product in hours. They must have felt like they needed a break, because they've taken a hell of a hammering recently for a company that makes chocolate and lollies. A crowd-funding bid to keep the Dunedin factory going raised more than $5 million in 'fuck you, Cadbury' money in less than a week, their palm oil nightmares have literally left a bad taste in the mouth and everyone still misses those little fucking Tangy Fruit pottles.
When your target audience is using nationalistic concerns to raise money to try and take your intellectual property, seeing the new 'limited edition' Jaffa Lumps show up on breakfast TV must have been pure relief.
But there are two things to note about this approach - the first is that these things are just a distraction, and fickle as fuck, and everybody trying out a new lolly can still be still pissed that the Dunedin production is going over the Tasman. They might forget it as the silky smooth Jaffa Lumps goes down the throat, but it takes more than a neat new gimmick to overlook years of indifference and outright disdain shown by the company towards its local consumers and workforce.
The other thing worth mentioning is that the more you try to get that kind of reaction from a new product, the less successful it will be. There is a classic example in the KFC double down, the bun-less burger that caused all sorts of palpitations and worried think-pieces on the downfall of society when it was introduced a few years back.
All that hype - a lot of it generated by the biggest media companies in the country - meant the food line was a huge success. Restaurant Brands credited the product for a notable uptick in the entire company's profit at the time.
But in the media's double down hangover, there was some regret, and some small shame, about getting so excited about it. And the next time KFC came around with a crazy new product - look! it's a pie! - the response was more subdued. There was the feeling that KFC had got its fair share of free publicity, making it ultra-harder for that business to ever get close to that kind of coverage again.
These Jaffa Lumps are quite tasty - if you dig the orange chocolate chip flavour - and are a pleasant enough distraction, but they're no solution to the worries of people who have had enough of corporate indifference. The media can let the skepticism drop for a little while, but only as long as it takes to swallow a lolly
- Steve Lombard
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