Tuesday, March 7, 2017

R#3: Taco Bell Throws Shade in Hopes to Bathe in Cash.

As almost any college kid will tell you Taco Bell is one of the best places to eat ever. They are cheap, the food is passable, and even better they are open until 3 am when you just happened to realize that you were supposed to eat at some point that day. However, Taco Bell just released a new food item that had more than a few people scratching their heads, Naked Chicken Chalupa. This food item is a chalupa with a shell made entirely of Chicken. Say what you will about the concept of the item, but the way that Taco Bell is marketing the fried monstrosity to the public is interesting, and a terrific example of reverse psychology as a marketing tactic.


Traditional marketing

 Before we get into the specifics of the "anti-campaign" let's look at what Taco Bell is doing in a traditional sense. The company has not released any kind of fried chicken in my recent memory, but after doing some new market research they realized that there was an unprecedented demand in the current fast food market for Fried Chicken (Whol 2017). This demand is what led to the creation of the chalupa. They are marketing using the same methods that have proven to be so favorable to the company thus far. Television ads which are then quickly ported to Facebook and YouTube so that they can target the audiences that they believe will purchase it.



 In addition to using these methods, Taco Bell continued with a now tradition when Taco Bell releases a new item. They incorporated a hashtag with the food item. #NakedChickenChalupa which never quite hit the trending status of their Doritos locos tacos which went from limited time to full-time menu status. But they did get the reach that they were trying to achieve by having people tweet about the chalupa and get excited about getting the item. This hashtag gave the food item its own little subsection of the Twitterverse, and as Andreas Kaplan put it in Users of the world, unite! The challenges and opportunities of Social Media "The main objective of content communities is the sharing of media content between users"(Kaplan). The quote mentions "content communities" which at the time of writing the article was simply the website where people were generating their own information and content, such as YouTube and early Facebook circa. 2009. However, within Twitter content communities exist in this new form of content, known colloquially as hashtags. The tags allow users to group tweets with a similar meaning and target by typing in the same string of characters following the # sign.



However more importantly than the random person who tweeted their love for the Naked Chicken. This tweet from an "influencer" is what Taco Bell was really after.





Bridget is a television star and has far more followers than the average user. According to Max Chafkins article on Bloomberg the sponsored posts typically have a #sp somewhere within the post(Chafkin). The lack of any indication of payment in the tweet itself and that she doesn't actually show the chalupa leads me to believe that she may have just tweeted it out to be part of the fad. But Regardless her influence could have encouraged people to go to Taco Bell and be a part the food craze that is #NakedChickenChalupa. This marketing campaign seems to have been effective, but it was not alone in its endeavors.


Counter Marketing

 One of first rules in marketing is to always put your product in the best light possible. It's a basic concept which has kept that industry going for years, but Taco Bell decided that they were going to try and do something new. After the naked chicken chalupa was released to the public some commercials started to pop up.




These took a separate approach from the Taco Bell commercials we were used to seeing. These wanted to use a psychological technique known as reverse psychology, and I think they were fairly successful. The commercial above tells people to beware of the danger of the chalupa. In fact, it purports to be from the "Council For Eating Fried Chicken The Same Way You Always Have." If you go to their website, thecouncilforeatingfriedchickenthesamewayyoualwayshave.org, then you will be immediately redirected to the Taco Bell website. The council also has its own Twitter feed which offers support to help protect your loved ones from the Naked Chicken Chalupa.




The above tweet is clearly dissatisfied with your choice in lunches for the day.







Whereas this one warns that the devil lies in wait within the gloriously golden brown Taco Bell fried chicken shell.

These tweets coupled with the commercials that were released by the pseudo-council gave Taco Bell a powerful weapon against the public. They seemed to already have dissenters, and they made their product a joke before anyone else could. This was a strong arm in deciding how their concoction would be perceived by the public and thus gave them the upper hand in deciding what their next steps could be. By making the chalupa a joke they were saying to the public "we know this is crazy, but why don't you try it and make up your own mind." The only thing that I see as a flaw with this strategy on social media is that there was not enough coming out from "the council" about the chalupa. If they had released more commercials, or even just sent more tweets out then it could have been even bigger than it already was. So Taco Bell the next time you want to make a joke of your food commit. Make people really think that others don't want them to go out and eat your food.
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