A delirious walk through Nutter Butter land
Marketing is quite a silly thing at times, sometimes you view something and feel that it is a grasping at straws sort of attempt at garnering attention towards some unremarkable product or brand. Other times you might be amused at the lengths some of these companies will go, may it be shock, awe, or aggravating, something was able to stick and captivate enough to set up a cozy camp in your mind. I suppose that the piece of marketing that I will be discussing today lies somewhere in between and yet firmly on either side of this spectrum, at least when I see it. The once humble Nutter Butter, and its current marketing strategy will be spotlighted in this post today.
Unhinged, surreal, and a little scary are a couple of adjectives that come to mind when viewing the social media of Nutter Butter currently. The brands pages sport many videos of colorful hodge podges centering Nutter Butter amidst disembodied voices, flashing colors, and off putting and nonsensical atmospheres. https://www.tiktok.com/@officialnutterbutter/video/7566284493108038934?is_from_webapp=1&sender_device=pc&web_id=7566869432308925965
This is their latest tiktok, and while creepy, it is more comprehensible in comparison to some of their other videos, whose erratic pacing and bizarre content leave many confused and intrigued.
This very confusion is a part of their goals however. In a medium article written by marketing consultant, Mark Shaefer discusses the marketing power of tapping into these “high arousal” emotions as being a pillar for marketing prowess, and that while most focus on associating their brands with positive emotions, Shaefer mentions how fear, anger, and outrage are also viable outlets for brands to be seen. The brand eschews the more positive model of associations, and opts instead for a viral marketing approach, using its bizarre content to stir conversation and get more eyes onto Nutter Butter and build momentum. With its focus on tiktok, it has used the short form medium to its advantage to create bite sized pieces of delirium for scrollers to stumble upon and become confused and intrigued by.
While some will find this original, these ads do harken back to the likes of quiznos, with their incredibly polarizing singing spongemonkey mascot ads from 2003.
https://youtu.be/ZuPTZWhz46M?si=Y4kfoqJVlqqnA3mZ
The spongemonkeys unfortunately did not find the love they deserved, but Nutter Butter is certainly making waves with the primarily gen z userbase of Tiktok. I think they are hitting their target audience with their choice of medium and content that they are pushing. More chronically online people such as myself do recognize that the content they make is of a certain template within online humour, and that it was a wise choice to utilize that to create more interest within gen z and alpha. Though the kids may like it, it is still certainly jarring, and not for most. Some commenters calling it nightmarish would be correct.
This alienation that they have baked into the brand content creates an in group and out group, for better or worse. A key strength definitely being the virality of these posts, enough people are sharing and talking about it that I heard about all of this from a random tiktok describing the antics of Nutter Butter. Much like the spongemonkeys however, weird is weird, and the niche that they are carving out does not include people off put by these ads. What differentiates Nutter Butter from the spongemonkeys is the current landscape that these ads reside. While consumers would change the channel when disturbed by shrill singing, a tiktok would be made covering the outlandish video that Nutter Butter put out. There is more of an interactive conversation now, in which scrollers play off each other and Nutter Butter takes in these reactions and formulates their next moves.
https://www.marketingbrew.com/stories/2025/06/12/nutter-butter-online-marketing-strategy
The social media team behind Nutter Butter discusses this process more within the article above.
As 3:30AM strikes, as the sleep deprivation grows, Nutter Butters fever dreams are beginning to make more sense. My stomach grumbles, and I am reminded of when I was the fastest package handler( Chucker of boxes) at the UPS facility in Portland, and every day, I would get Nutter Butters with my UPS monopoly money to get me through the day. After I left that job for college, I had not thought of the sweet treat until I stumbled upon this brand account. I think that these ads are current, and effective, harnessing much of the surreal energy of the internet, and tapping into the type of content and memes that the younger generations have and are growing up with.
Despite my identification with these wacky videos, and learning about the lengths that these companies go to remain relevant in the media sphere, I still ultimately see these as ads. I would like to say that they have character, but these videos are re-hashes of internet content that I would see back in high school. Though novel, and fun, for me this sweet treat has yet to truly break through the noise and make me re-live my days in the warehouse.
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