StarKist To Reposition “Charlie” In Comfort Marketing Campaignff

Source: The New York Times

A campaign for StarKist tuna reworks the brand’s longtime “Sorry Charlie” theme — which StarKist began using to sell canned tuna in 1961 — to depict people saying, “Thanks Charlie” for newer products like tuna in pouches.

The StarKist campaign is part of a trend on Madison Avenue that might be called comfort marketing, which is becoming more popular as the economy sputters. Advertisers are bringing back vintage characters, themes and jingles in hopes that evoking fond memories of the past may help shoppers feel better about buying products now.

Comfort marketing is part of efforts to reassure consumers who demand value for money that they are buying products that have stood the test of time. But to counter perceptions that brands trading in nostalgia are too old-fashioned for contemporary needs, many of the revivals, like StarKist’s, also involve updating and refreshing the mascots, songs, slogans and other venerable ad elements.

After Charlie’s 50th anniversary last year, executives at StarKist and its agency, MMB, decided to make the character a central figure as he was in the days of “Sorry Charlie,” a campaign created by Leo Burnett for a previous StarKist owner, H. J. Heinz.

The premise of the animated “Sorry Charlie” commercials was that Charlie — voiced by the actor Herschel Bernardi — kept trying to cultivate “good taste” so he could become a StarKist tuna. But StarKist kept rejecting him because, as another fish would declare, “StarKist don’t want tunas with good taste. StarKist wants tunas that taste good.”

An announcer then intoned, “Sorry Charlie, only good-tasting tuna get to be StarKist,” and in many of the spots, a fish hook appeared, to which was attached a note reading, “Sorry Charlie.”

“There is no particular negative about the ‘Sorry Charlie’ campaign, but 50 years has passed,” said In-Soo Cho, president and chief executive at the StarKist Company, part of Dongwon Industries of South Korea. “We thought giving new life to Charlie would be good.”

The new “Thanks Charlie” campaign, with a budget estimated at $18 million, is “not us talking about Charlie,” Mr. Cho said. “Now, it’s consumers talking about Charlie, and that interaction made more sense.”

In tests consumers said they liked the new approach, but Mr. Cho said he was nervous about the change. “You should always be careful,” he added, “but if you don’t push the envelope, you never evolve.”

Fred Bertino, president and creative director at MMB, called the campaign “a platform for the future, because we could start thanking Charlie for all the new products the brand would be delivering.”

You want to keep your icon, but a lot of people make the mistake of using it in the same old way,” Mr. Bertino said. “This is still Charlie, but a fresh take on Charlie, giving him more dimension.”