When I mention ‘children’ and ‘vegetables’, most parents inherently know that I’m talking about sworn rivals 🙂
My daughter makes a fuss for brinjal but manages to eat most other vegetables, while my son makes a fuss for drumstick but is generally ok with most other vegetables. But I know what a struggle it is to make kids consistently get their intake of fresh vegetables, and most parents could understand that too.
There has been a lot of advertising and related efforts around making children prefer and eat vegetables, and generally around linking children and vegetables in some context, either highlighting the fact that they hate eating vegetables, or mining mirth from this observation!
One of the earliest pop culture references is Popeye the Sailor who famously ate spinach and got his strength! It is said that Popeye helped increase American consumption of spinach by a third, despite the fact that the supposed iron content in spinach was framed wrongly (a decimal blunder) and that led to Popeye’s character decision by the studio executives!
Here’s a good starter: a Peruvian campaign by the agency Lowe, back in January 2010.
The campaign was actually for a departmental store that was offering a discount on fresh vegetables – 35% off. Instead of showing tempting pictures of fresh vegetables, the agency had a large photo of a crying child (in the style of famous ). There was no other copy – just a crying child and the offer, with the supreme confidence that people would be hooked to the interesting photo, read the offer note, and make the connection!
The opposite of the Peruvian campaign was by Chef Boyardee, an American canned pasta brand from Conagra foods. Their September 2010 campaign, by DDB San Francisco, had happy and pleased-looking children holding on to some vegetable with great care and love! The ad calls them, ‘the mythical veggie-loving kid’ and offers their canned product (like beef ravioli or ‘beefaroni’) as an option for the kids since they are loaded with vegetables, besides the beef. The series had a fantastic caption – ‘Obviously delicious. Secretly nutritious!
In March 2014, the German agency Scholz & Friends used the same theme for their tomato ketchup client, Werder. The idea was to portray the ketchup as something that can make the vegetables palatable for kids who otherwise hate them. For someone like me who generally abhors tomato ketchup, that sounds like a preposterous idea, but I do know how much kids love ketchup, so I can understand the sentiment. In this campaign, the agency depicts vegetables as visibly obvious scary monsters and offers Werder Ketchup as a savior, literally!
The Belgian supermarket Delhaize, based on the need to increase sales of vegetables, created a campaign through their agency, TBWA Brussels, in May 2018. This was a smart idea – they renamed vegetables as something that kids can get excited about! So carrots become ‘orange rockets’, mushrooms become ‘gnome trumpets’, and cucumbers become troll bats, among others. The idea is to excite the imagination of the children and from that perspective, this was inventive!
One of the most hyped campaigns that directly addressed the need to get children to eat more vegetables in Britain was led by the British TV network ITV, and the NGO Veg Power, in January 2019. The agency, adam&eveDDB UK, framed vegetables as scary monsters (yet again!), but offered a different solution unlike Werder’s Ketchup idea – they suggested, in an effort to excite children, that they should eat the monsters to defeat them! I felt this was terribly misguided! Not only are they reiterating to children something they already strongly believe in (vegetables are scarily tasteless, no wonder kids are crying when asked to eat them), but the idea to eat something that is scary as a way to vanquish it is also a suggestion of violence. At least the video makes it so – in terms of the parents being under attack and children eating the attacking vegetables in what looks like it is straight out of a Manoj Night Shyamalan film!
A flip to the vegetables-as-monsters idea was also attempted in 2016, where vegetables were given the imagery of superheroes – Colby Carrot, Erica Eggplant and more were part of a group called Super Sprowtz! This was a positive framing of what was negative in the British ‘Eat them to defeat them’ or the Werder’s defeat scary vegetables with ketchup idea.
Earlier this year, I had written about a campaign by the European fresh vegetables and fruits processor HAK, that got the agency DDB Unlimited and researchers at the Dutch University of Wageningen to think of ways to make people eat more vegetables. The result was a product innovation and not a marketing communication. It was a plate that uses subterfuge, creating an illusion of limited vegetable portion but is actually more than what it seems!
From a non-marketing, research perspective, there have been attempts like involving kids in cooking as a way to get them interested in vegetables and even outright bribing with money if children ate vegetables 🙂
Even packaging-level ideas have been tried, like the Canadian attempts at offering fresh vegetables in alluring packs with exciting branding.
One of the most recent, and utterly charming, ad campaigns to use this line of thought of connecting children and vegetables is from an unrelated brand – a French retailers’ cooperative called U Shops. The campaign, by the agency TBWA\Paris, conceives a gentle giant who creates an illusion that he became tall by consuming a particular brand of (vegetable) soup! The fable of the tall man and soup spreads and the soup brand (instant soup available in bottles) gets sold out from everywhere! The mystery of the giant is revealed in the end in an interesting twist, again going back to subterfuge! 🙂
Somehow, we have never had a campaign around vegetables and children in India, though we have had famous campaigns to induce children to eat eggs and drink milk! It’s probably because we cook vegetables in so many interesting ways in India, or it could be because parents generally offer to their children, “If you do not eat your vegetables, you’d get one tight slap!” 🙂