National Pork Board

This 2015 projection of protein production published by *The Wall Street Journal* has been upended by the spread of African swine flu; poultry will overtake pork this year instead.

In the United States it seems hardly news that poultry is the most-consumed protein. In recent years poultry consumption in America has grown while beef consumption has stagnated, weighed down by high prices at the consumer level.

At the same time, the National Pork Board committed an unforced error earlier in this decade when it abandoned its longstanding (and doubtless highly effective) tagline “The Other White Meat” in favor of the mealy-mouthed platitude “Pork: Be inspired” – a slogan that convinces no one of anything.

Persistent reports from the medical community that red meat is less healthy than consuming poultry and fish products haven’t helped, either.

But poultry’s prominence in the American market hasn’t necessarily extended to many parts of the rest of the world. But that’s now changing.

In fact, according to reporting from a recently-concluded International Poultry Council meeting in the Netherlands, poultry is poised to become the most consumed meat protein in 2019.

The precipitating factor is African swine fever, which is now affecting pig herds in 15 countries on three continents. Pork production losses this year are expected to represent ~14% of the world’s pork supply – and that’s just the minimum forecast; the losses could go higher.

Interestingly, African swine fever’s most significant initial outbreaks were in Russia and Eastern Europe, but now East Asia is being affected most significantly. The first cases were found in China beginning in August 2018 but now have spread rapidly throughout the country. For a country that is responsible for nearly half of the world’s supply of pigs, that’s a very big deal.

The swine fever is spreading to the nearby country of Viet Nam as well – which is the world’s fifth largest producer of pork.

The problem for pig growers is that African swine fever is the quintessential death sentence: The disease has a 100% mortality rate, and no vaccine has been developed to guard against its spread.

According to global food and agriculture financing firm Rabobank, China is expected to experience a ~30% drop in pork supplies this year, which in turn will mean a decline in total world protein supplies. The twin results of these development: an increase in prices for all proteins … and poultry will overtake pork this year as the world’s most consumed protein.

Until such time when an effective vaccine against African swine fever is developed, we can expect that production of other proteins like poultry, eggs, beef and seafood will rise. So, it seems as though poultry’s presence as the world’s most-consumed protein will likely endure. Poultry’s position as the protein leader may have stemmed from a different impetus in the United States than in the rest of the world, but everyone has ended up in the same place.

Pork. Be inspired. — Hardly inspiring: The National Pork Board's new marketing slogan has little chance of matching the effectiveness of the one it's replacing: "Pork: The Other White Meat."

When you decide to ditch a successful marketing slogan after nearly 25 years, you’d better have a very good reason. Because that’s what’s happening with the National Pork Board, which announced last week that it is retiring its promotional tagline Pork: The Other White Meat.

According to statistics reported by the industry organization, annual per capita pork consumption in the United States has remained essentially flat at ~50 pounds in recent years, while annual beef consumption has declined to ~61 pounds and chicken has risen to ~80 pounds.

The Pork Board determined that the best to way achieve new growth would be to convince people who already eat pork to consume more of it, rather than to continue trying to encourage other consumers to shift to pork.

Ceci Snyder, vice president of marketing for the National Pork Board, said this: “We want to increase pork sales by 10% by 2014. To do that, we needed to make a stronger connection – a more emotional connection to our product.”

This kind of strategy may make sense in that ~28% of American households represent nearly 70% of the total at-home consumption of fresh pork products. And it’s probably true that these people don’t need to be continually reminded of the “healthy” characteristics of pork via the “Other White Meat” slogan.

But retiring a marketing theme is one thing … and coming up with a compelling slogan to replace it is quite another.

And the one that is being debuted strikes me as a poor substitute. Are you ready to hear what it is? Drum-roll please …

“Pork. Be inspired.”

Excuse, me, but this is about as inspiring as reading the pages of the Des Moines telephone directory.

I have no doubt that the Pork Board focus group-tested this new message, and it probably came out with no posted negatives. After all, who could object to this innocuous little slogan?

But here’s a problem: It says almost nothing to anyone. If I’m a pork lover, how is this slogan supposed to make me any more inspired than I was before about preparing pork recipes? And it I’m someone who doesn’t eat pork – or eats it only infrequently – what does this tagline do to encourage me to take fresh look at this meat?

In my view, “The Other White Meat” positioning communicated so much more, not least in that there was a “health” component to the slogan. The message of healthy eating has become more important in recent years rather than less, and the beauty of that tagline is that it speaks strongly to pork consumers and non-consumers alike.

Any time your marketing slogan can speak powerfully to multiple audiences, you’ve got a winner.

And here’s another thing: All of the Pork Board’s energy and resources that have gone into publicizing “The Other White Meat” over the past two decades have resulted in a recognition of “health parity” between pork and chicken in the minds of consumers.

Consumer field research has shown that, thanks to the marketing efforts of the pork industry, ~80% of American consumers today associate “the other white meat” with pork. Retiring the slogan now will only mean a slow degradation of that association over time.

This seems like tossing a whole lot of goodwill into the trash can.

The National Pork Board reports that it will be plowing more than $11 million into an advertising campaign to roll out its new marketing slogan, beginning this month. I’m sure they have every intention of scoring the same success now as they achieved with “The Other White Meat” before.

Unfortunately, it may not matter how much money there is available to throw at the campaign. The best measure of how successful it’ll be is in the inherent compelling power of the theme.

“Pork. Be inspired.” doesn’t do it … on any level I can think of.

Memo to the marketing folks at the Pork Board: Forget the beaucoup bucks you’ve already expended developing this bowser of a slogan. Instead, troll around online and see some of the alternative taglines “Joe and Jane Consumer” have come up with. The Los Angeles Times, for one, invited their readers to submit alternative ideas. I particularly like one that came from Jacqueline Ochsner, a reader from Santa Monica, California: “Pork: The better white meat.”

Not only is that slogan a better one, it was offered up free of charge!