According to information provided to Marketing Dive, Barilla, the biggest pasta company in the world, made its TikTok debut this week with a spoof of the Lipps Inc. song “Funkytown” with lyrics centered around macaroni.
To promote his music and fictitious pasta holidays, Barilla partnered with Khaby Lame, an Italian TikTok creator with more than 59 million followers. The latest campaign from Barilla to use music to engage with more young consumers who are cooking at home was developed by the firm We Are Social.
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Through a public relations effort, Barilla entered the TikTok marketing space, acknowledging a peculiar trend that has been catching some app users’ attention for more than a year. The company responded to a meme hashtag that was started by a popular film that showed creators methodically counting down the days until they could have a bowl of macaroni on May 24. In an effort to forge a stronger emotional bond with its products, Barilla, which refers to the occasion as Macaroni Day, has been working on a larger brand positioning called “A Symbol of Love” since earlier this year.
As more individuals started cooking at home during the early stages of the pandemic, the packaged food category of pasta attracted a lot of customer interest. A New York Times article this week described how creators like Eitan Bernath accumulated millions of followers in a short amount of time, while inexperienced chefs searched for recipes and looked for culinary guidance. Aspiring foodies, especially Gen Z, are also increasingly making TikTok their home. The pattern implies TikTok is expanding beyond its dancing and lip-sync video beginnings, which may give advertisers more opportunities.
However, Barilla adapted the disco song “Funkytown” by Lipps Inc., which first reached the top 40 in the early 1980s, in order to blend into the platform’s musical focus. The record was released before TikTok’s younger-skewing user demographic, yet it has been heavily featured on the app. Fleetwood Mac’s “Dreams” received its most listens ever after a viral video featuring a man drinking cranberry juice and skateboarding last year sent the song back to the top of the charts.
Barilla is attempting to take advantage of customer interest in music streaming in other ways. It published a set of eight Spotify playlists earlier this year whose playing intervals matched the cooking durations of various pasta shapes.