Holiday Baking with Kerrygold
Everyone who works in public relations plays an advocacy role. So you have to believe in your clients’ products. If your heart isn’t in it, you can’t promote with conviction.
Of course, sometimes the product may not be what you would care to cook or eat yourself. But if you know that it fills an honest need for some other segment of the population that’s okay, too. If I were only going to promote products I love, my next client would have to be a foie gras account, like my lucky colleague, Karsha.
One client product I’m personally crazy about is Kerrygold Butter. It is just plain unctuous — rich and creamy — with a remarkable natural golden color. The cows in Ireland are not confined to barns but get to roam free during the day, eating a diet of the greenest Irish grass (not grain). So the butter from these contented cows turns out a deeper gold color from the beta carotene in the grass. Not only is it a great table butter and butter for cooking, it’s the queen of butters for baking.
This holiday season, my fridge contains a stack of Kerrygold. I’ve already gone through two pounds of the unsalted to make shortbread cookie snowflakes. The recipe I used comes from the original Stars Desserts book, by James Beard award-winning pastry chef Emily Luchetti. I took a trayful of these scrumptious cookies to the Les Dames d’Escoffier holiday party last Friday. Emily, who is also a member, was sick and unable to attend — I always feel a bit of trepidation when the cookbook author of a dish I made happens to be present (although Emily’s too nice to say anything bad).
Before I first started to work on the Kerrygold business, I shipped butter to some pastry chefs and baking book authors to vet the product. I got nothing but rave reviews from these experts.
Two years ago, my clients and I held a blind butter tasting in my test kitchen, bringing together a top San Francisco French chef, a restaurant consultant and cookbook author, a James Beard award-winning master sommelier and a pastry chef and baking author. We found that Kerrygold butter made crisper, more golden cookies with a more buttery taste.
Armed with those findings and a further chefs’ tasting hosted by Food & Wine magazine, we developed a microsite on tasting butter complete with downloadable tasting sheets so you can do your own comparative tasting. Kerrygold wins from the basic supermarket butter, hands-down. Try it yourself.
In PR, vetting products in advance ensures that you can develop clear, credible messages because you’ve had first-hand knowledge of product performance.
A few years ago, while I was at Ketchum, I helped to launch Glad Press ‘n Seal Wrap, the first sealable plastic wrap. Before we developed our press campaign for the launch, we invited some testers: a nationally acclaimed cooking teacher, a former magazine food editor and a cookbook author who had written about 15 books. Was the wrap as revolutionary as we thought? Our testers were completely enamored with how it performed. We knew we had a winner.
When I am invited to pitch my PR services to a new client, I insist on product samples so I can do some basic tasting and cooking tests. Sometimes, I ask a few food influencers (cookbook authors, food writers, cooking teachers, chefs and others) to participate. Only then am I ready to develop a communications strategy and a public relations plan.
Discovery: that’s the start of good PR.
