Upstate Farms - Taste The Freshness
Building a brand in one of the most commoditized categories in the world.
The moment
Upstate Farms is a dairy cooperative in upstate and western New York — more than 250 family farms producing a full range of dairy products including milk, ice cream, butter, yogurt, and cultured products. They supplied much of the milk bought by consumers in the region, but most of it was store-branded. The Upstate Farms name appeared on relatively little of what they actually produced.
The business was facing a very challenging future. Milk consumption had been in decline for twenty years. Margin pressure was relentless — soft demand on one side, supermarket chains like Wegmans demanding their share on the other. Yogurt hadn't yet emerged as a growth category. The cooperative had decided on a strategy to complement its private label business by building its own consumer brand, one that could command better margins in the supermarket and convenience store trade.
That would be an uphill battle. There was nothing to differentiate the milk line — half & half, whole, 2%, 1%, nonfat, chocolate, all in the same sizes and containers as the store brands.
The brief
At our branding and design firm, our assignment was the packaging graphics, but an agency had been hired to develop an advertising campaign to jumpstart the brand-building process. I was keen on seeing their work. We shared the same fundamental problem — how to differentiate the milk — and I wondered how they had approached it.
The agency's creative brief was focused on emphasizing the unique taste of Upstate Farms milk — something like a terroir story, suggesting you could discern the difference of what the cows ate, how they were tended, how the local environment expressed itself in the product. Our client, the marketing leader, was bullish on it. I didn't share his enthusiasm.
All the concepts clearly answered the brief — which is not always the case. But I believed the brief itself was the problem. If we needed to encourage people to switch from a familiar store brand that tasted perfectly fine, we were promising a discernible difference that didn't exist — it was the same liquid. And for occasional or non-milk drinkers, I worried that focusing so intently on taste would remind them of the qualities that put them off milk in the first place.
The concepts reinforced my concern. They were all print — magazine or newspaper spreads. One headline read: "Only upstate cows give upstate taste." Others created visual analogies, with a glass of milk on one page and a large photograph of a regionally iconic food on the facing page — a chicken wing, a garbage plate. For the uninitiated, a garbage plate is two cheeseburger patties smothered in hot sauce sitting on a heap of macaroni salad and home fries. The intent was local pride and taste association.
But the upshot was a suggestion to drink milk with a garbage plate.
Not just confusing. Actively unappetizing.
I had worked in agencies. I had been part of creative presentations where work was ostensibly on brief but contained choices that everyone in the room should have known were wrong. I sensed that might be happening here.
But my concern went beyond the creative. I knew our client would be in trouble if he had to spend a lot of time explaining the work and what it means not to mention why it’s right to his leadership after the agency went home.
The best work needs very little explanation — people either get it or they don't.
With these concepts, I knew our client was going to have to address why the ad with the garbage plate wasn't actually suggesting you eat it with milk. Someone in his chain of command would be sure to ask. I wanted to spare him that conversation — what comes with it when the future proves the question was on point all along.
But I didn't have a better idea. At least not yet.
The discovery
Then I attended the ribbon-cutting for a new, expanded processing plant. There were speeches from the president of the cooperative — a farmer — and from the CEO and the VP of Sales & Marketing. Each in their own way, they talked about the same thing: how important it is to move the highest quality milk from farm to shelf as fast as possible. That's what the new plant would help them do.
Their unanimous, deeply personal commitment was to deliver milk to customers that is as fresh as humanly possible.
I remember standing in that refrigerated space with my winter coat and gloves on, thinking: "That's it."
Freshness was the core value and needed to be their brand promise. Its center of gravity. And emphasizing freshness could speak to the authentic commitment of the leaders and farmers of the cooperative while implying great taste — without being so literal or risky.
I brought it back to our team. Since we all had advertising experience, we developed a positioning line — Taste the Freshness — and proposed a campaign built around it: a humorous approach using simple line drawings of familiar scenes, like a middle-aged guy driving a car with a cow positioned like a dog with its head out the window. The headline: "Any fresher, and you'd have to bring the cow home."
We convinced our client to test our campaign and line in the market research alongside the agency's concepts.
The result: in quantitative testing, our concept was preferred 2:1 over the next most preferred campaign in one of their target markets, and 3:1 in their home market.
Why it held
In the end, Upstate Farms didn’t move ahead with the consumer advertising because of budget constraints. But Taste the Freshness was adopted and used across packaging, fleet graphics, and point of sale to distinguish the Upstate Farms brand for well over a decade.
The concept held because we found the idea that was as true and central for the people of the cooperative as it was for everyone in the distribution channel — including the consumers. Everyone wants the freshest milk. By stepping up and owning that claim, Upstate Farms gave itself a center of gravity in one of the most commoditized categories in the world.
It was hiding in plain sight. In a refrigerated room, in the middle of winter, in the words of the people who cared about it most.
It was also early in my career — maybe ten years in — and it was the first time I recognized that the core of a brand can hide in plain sight. That became the foundation of everything I've done since.
