Gardenburger Follows the Trend

I recently reported about how GM is using college students to help market the Aveo to the young adult market. This seems to be becoming a common theme, using college students to help market a product to their demographic. With so much spending power, especially in discretionary items, many brands and products want to take advantage of this target market. The issue is that college students are a difficult market to reach, especially since they do not pay attention to traditional media advertising. They need to be pursued and want to be interacted with; therefore, companies are approaching college students and having them create unique marketing tactics in reaching this market.

The Denver Post has reported that Gardenburger is another company that has asked for the help of college students for a new marketing campaign in an article entitled, “CU May Seed Veggie Revival.” When veggie burgers were developed 23 years ago, they were almost impossible to find, mostly limited to organic food stores. Today “veggie burgers are available on menus, in major supermarkets, and increasingly, in college dining halls” (Crowell). Gardenburger has asked five colleges “to spearhead and drive its upcoming campaign and to give the company a fresh outlook.” Colleges asked include, The University of Colorado at Boulder, California State University at Long Beach, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and Columbia University in New York City. Gardenburger approached advertising classes at universities in health-conscious cities and plans to use at least one university for the new marketing campaign, which is planned to launch in the fall. Why college students? Young people are eating a lot of veggie burgers for health and social-conscious reasons. College students tend to be very aware of health and environment issues. Melanie Flaherty, a Gardenburger representative explains, “College students are a ‘natural target.’ They eat the products because they are vegetarian, or for health reasons, or for environmental and compassion reasons.”

Gardenburger is a small company and has to compete with food giants, such as Kellogg and Kraft which have bought out smaller burger companies, such as Boca Burgers and Morningstar Farms. Gardenburger’s 2005 Annual Report stated that the company plans to expand its market from only supermarkets by introducing the product in “sandwich chains, K-12 schools, and college and universities.”

CU-Boulder has a senior level class called Advertising Campaigns, which consists of 15 students who are brainstorming for Gardenburger’s new campaign. They are figuring out how to get CU students to eat Gardenburger products and want to implement some of their ideas before the semester is over. According to their research, “Students said finding vegan meals on campus was important to them. Vegan meals contain no meat, fish, poultry, dairy, or byproducts derived from animals.” Greg Wagner, advertising professor at CU-Boulder commented, “If we come up with terrific ideas, maybe they’ll use us as a test market. Then if (the campaign) works on Boulder they might say, ‘Let’s roll out to other college campuses.’”

This article differed from the GM article in that the GM competition already happened; therefore the campaign ideas were reported. The Gardenburger campaigns are in the works, so the article focused a lot on the company and why they need to reposition themselves (partly due to the fact that they filed for bankruptcy this past October). I find it so interesting that companies continue to approach college students rather than advertising agencies to help them with campaign ideas. I know that it saves them money by not using an agency, but they are trusting students to come up with ideas on how to sell their product. Also, I think that companies figure if they want to get opinions from college students, there is no better place to do it than a college campus. The students can perform research on the product and other students’ feelings on the product, which in turn, helps them with the campaign. There is obviously a trend occurring here and I will once again state that I think that more companies are going to use college students to help them with their campaigns if they want to reach the college student market.