Comfort Food Compensation: Kraft Rewards Macaroni-and-Cheese Twitterers

Brands continue to search for ways to bind customers to their products. The convergence of comfort food and technology has long been appreciated by hungry code-writers. Kraft Foods is now attempting to institutionalize the promotional benefits by rewarding those who wax poetic about their products. This is an interesting test of both brand equity - and of which reward systems might actually demonstrate adhesion in a world that is outwardly resistent to direct commercial sponsorship, particularly by those, mostly younger consumers, who may consider it uncool.

Todd Wasserman at Mashable doles it out:

"Kraft Foods is resurrecting a childhood game and adding a modern social media element — Twitter — to get people talking about macaroni and cheese.

Under a new program quietly rolled out over the past few weeks, any time two people individually use the phrase “mac & cheese” in a tweet, they’ll each get a link pointing out the “Mac & Jinx.” The first one to click the link and give Kraft his or her address gets five free boxes of Kraft’s mac and cheese and a T-shirt.

The Mac & Jinx promotion is the latest offbeat effort for the brand from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the envelope-pushing ad agency behind Burger King’s advertising over the past decade or so and Microsoft’s “Laptop Hunters” campaign, among others. Crispin’s other work for Kraft includes TV ads showing kids complaining that their parents eat their macaroni and cheese dinners and outdoor ads that reacted to consumers’ facial expressions.

The agency and the brand’s entry into Twitter comes as marketers have been generally slow to realize the platform’s potential, usually tacking on a Twitter component to a Facebook-heavy campaign. One exception is Gillette, whose fall 2010 campaign sought to respond to and alleviate irritated Twitter users on behalf of the brand’s Edge Shave Gel.