Not Your Grandmother’s Cheese

Alena Joling, a student at the University of Wisconsin- Milwaukee, sits alone at the counter of a dark coffee house on campus, sipping her coffee.  She looks like actress Ellen Page, except with extremely short, bleached hair, Buddy Holly glasses, and sporting a mustard-colored tie. Underneath this hip exterior beats the heart of a devoted Cheesehead.

“It’s the best thing ever!” she says of Wisconsin cheese,  “I dated a guy in Kansas City once, nu-uh not so much for the Kraft cheese.  That’s all they have there.  I couldn’t stand it! I was bringing cases of cheese down to him.”

On the flip side is Chris Rowe who says he likes Wisconsin cheese but usually “just grab[s] whatever is at the store.”  This is the attitude that Patrick Geoghegan and the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board (WMMB) hope to correct.

Geoghegan is the senior vice president of communications at the WMMB and was the featured lecturer at an American Marketing Association gathering last week. During the lecture, Geoghegan explained how the WMMB is trying to target a wider diversity of consumers by updating the look of their print ads and developing a strong online brand.

“The research that we looked at said that we were stuck in the land of ordinary, that it was a safe buy.  We had this reputation that all we made was block cheddar.  So we needed to change that,” Geoghegan said.

Cheese as a Celebrity

The new campaign, commissioned by the WMMB, originated two years ago, but has really taken off only in the past year with the launch of the new websites.  The new campaign aims to show that Wisconsin cheese isn’t stodgy or boring, rather that it is exotic, exciting, almost a celebrity. Several times during the presentation Geoghegan, referred to Wisconsin cheese as “the hero” and called it “a cultural icon.”

The new print ads show gigantic hunks of cheese against a crimson background and have slogans like “indulge your cheese tooth.”   These glamour shots are designed to show that Wisconsin cheese is a luxury product and are geared mostly to food enthusiasts.

While saying print advertising “is a perceptual pillar that is always going to be there,” Geoghegan spent the most time talking about the campaign’s “online properties.”  Wisconsin cheese has gone online and now has a facebook page, twitter account, and several websites that link that each have their own facebook page and link back to the main WMMB website.

The Cheese and Burger Society and the Grilled Cheese Academy show 30 burgers and sandwiches apiece that all feature Wisconsin cheese as a main ingredient. The sites are narrated by two well-known actors: Patrick Warburton (Puddy from Seinfeld), and Jenna Fischer (Pam from The Office), respectively.

The Wisconsin Cheese Cupid site suggests what cheese to pair with your favorite beverage. The WMMB site features a series of webisodes with celebrity chef Michael Symon and finally, the Dairy Doing More site serves as the educational branch of the online campaign.

Mixed Success

According to Geoghegan, the sites are a big hit. As of Nov. 10:

• The Cheese and Burger website had 1,582,095 hits with people perusing the site for an average time of six minutes.
• The coordinating facebook page for the site had 77,486 “likes” on this date.
• Michael Symon’s videos on the site have garnered 53,374 site visits by Nov. 11 Geoghegan said.

While Geoghegan extolled the virtues and successes of this new campaign, some audience members pointed out some flaws.  Two people asked why Geoghegan hadn’t brought some cheese samples with him. “That would have been great, that would have built a brand right here with a hundred people,” said Michelle Luckiesh, who is the marketing manager at

Securant Bank and Trust

Luckiesh had another criticism for Geoghegan, “When you type a real simple word like cheese in on the website, the Wisconsin Milk Marketing Board or any of their micro-sites that they built didn’t even come up. Yet they’re trying to build the brand an online presence and that seemed like a pretty obvious miss on their end.”

In response, Geoghegan said that the effort is still a work in progress but he feels the campaign is working well.

Geoghegan admitted, “When people think about Wisconsin, they typically think about cheese. But when they think about cheese they don’t necessarily think about Wisconsin.”

Not-So-Happy Cows

Wisconsin cheese won over a third of the awards at a recent national cheese competition, reports Geoghegan.  According to the WMMB website, Wisconsin cheese won 98 ribbons including Best of Show at the American Cheese Society Conference held in August.

Joling suggests that Wisconsin cheese is the best because people in the state care about cheese.  “It’s because we don’t think it’s crazy to put a half-pound of cheese in a soup or in a salad,” she shrugs, then ads, “maybe it’s because our cows are actually happier.”

This is a reference the Happy Cows campaign from California.  The commercials are shown throughout Wisconsin and claim that “Great milk comes from happy cows, and happy cows come from California.”

Several people at the lecture asked how this campaign affects Wisconsin cheese and how the WMMB is combating the ads.

“I get calls all the time asking ‘What are you doing about those damn Happy Cows?’” says Geoghegan. He says that they can’t legally criticize the ads.  He reported that 21 million dollars were spent on those commercials, while the WMMB budget is only 30 million for the whole year.

Due to the budget, the WMMB doesn’t produce television ads nor do they advertise extensively in Wisconsin.  Geoghegan says they concentrate their efforts on other states because people in Wisconsin are already aware of how great the cheese is and are responsible for consuming 10 percent of Wisconsin cheese.

Geoghegan is quick to point out that people in Wisconsin shouldn’t feel threatened by the Happy Cow ads.  He says that outside of Wisconsin, California is the number one consumer of Wisconsin cheese.

However, Joling is still more than willing to refute the ads herself exclaiming, “It’s B.S.!  I grew up with cows and they were very happy…except for the ones we slaughtered.”