What do hip-hop and school nutrition marketing have in common? More than you might think.
Hip-hop didn’t emerge as an outgrowth of the existing music business - it was its own new, pioneering art form that grew under the radar. Mainstream media, radio stations, and even the burgeoning MTV didn’t take it seriously. The music business in general, as well as much of the public, considered it a fad, and the presence of many novelty records in the ‘80s is evidence of that.
Hip-hop existed in the realm of small, independent record companies that loved it and were growing something out of nothing, much as early jazz, blues, and rock & roll labels had done decades before. But those forerunners had become calcified in their approach and shrugged off hip-hop.
Once they saw it was making waves, they wanted it to conform to the way they did things, but the artists and labels dedicated to the art form wouldn’t go for it. Hip hop had its own culture, its own language, and its own way of doing things. By sticking to its principles, hip-hop didn’t just forge a new path and change the music industry; it became the dominant musical form on the planet.
So how does school nutrition marketing fit in? I’m glad you asked.
I hear regularly about the ways that restaurants do their marketing, and I am asked if school nutrition should be doing more of that. My response usually runs along the lines of, “Which parts of restaurant marketing?” You see, some things that restaurants do to market themselves are absolutely relevant to school nutrition, while others are distractions that take us away from what makes school nutrition unique.
Restaurants do a great job of presenting appealing images of their food, and many do a good job of connecting the communal aspect of food and the value of friends sharing meals together. Both of those things have real connections to how we can present school meals to our audiences (students, families, and school staff).
But restaurants generally don’t have to overcome outdated stereotypes and urban myths about their food. If it’s fast food, nobody worries about whether it’s healthy, because it isn’t, and everyone knows it. Finer dining establishments may focus on their ingredients, which is a great thing for school nutrition to do, but again, finer dining restaurants don’t worry about nutritional value, because they are destinations to splurge.
School food has to overcome both urban myths about the source of the food and the nutritional value. Customers choose the restaurants they go to, while school nutrition has a more confined audience. Students (and their parents/families) still have to choose to dine with us, but their options are limited.
So when we work with clients to showcase local or statewide foods, it’s dispelling the myths of school food coming from some obscure government warehouse, while also enlightening our customers about the quality of what we serve. When we build Compare/Contrast graphics that show the nutritional components of school food versus restaurant food, we again combat misinformation, while capturing the attention of an audience that thinks it has us figured out.
There are plenty of things we can learn from restaurants and their marketing, but there are also things that we do uniquely that deserve to be placed in the spotlight. We need to identify the things that make us stand out and emphasize those things, rather than try to replicate what a restaurant may be communicating that really doesn't apply to our situation.
Focus On What Makes You Unique
Ultimately, hip-hop established itself not by copying the ways other forms of popular music found success, but by focusing on what was most unique about it, and then adapting the existing mechanisms that worked for it, while ignoring those that didn’t work. It walked to its own beat, if you’ll pardon the pun.
The same goes for school nutrition marketing. What we do is unique. It has aspects that no restaurant will ever have to consider. It also has a tremendous ability to surprise, to delight, and to capture the imagination of people who think they already have us figured out. Our surprises are our secret strength. Stay focused on what you’re doing that is great and unique, and soon enough, we will have carved our own path that others want to copy.
