Beef Goes Back to Basics : New Advertising Shrugs Off Nutrition, Stresses Convenience

What’s for dinner? To hear Robert Mitchum tell it, it’s steak, hamburger, beef fajitas or stir-fry.

In its latest advertising campaign, the Beef Industry Council uses actor Mitchum’s sonorous tones to convey its new slogan: “Beef. It’s What’s for Dinner.”

The council’s new strategy is aimed at bringing back its core consumers--those long-time red meat eaters who strayed when beef producers focused their marketing strategies on beef’s healthful characteristics.

And while beef still is, by a slim margin, the most popular main course, Americans’ tastes and eating habits have been changing so much in the last decade that finding out what Americans want for dinner--and helping them decide--has become a major preoccupation for the folks who produce and promote beef, pork, chicken and turkey.

For the last several years, the competition to become the main course of choice has focused on Americans’ increasing concerns about dietary fat and cholesterol. But the nutritional messages haven’t played as well with consumers--especially hard-core beef lovers--as producers had hoped. Lifestyle and economics are proving to be just as important.

Consumption of chicken and, especially, turkey have risen dramatically in the last decade. Both are lower in fat, cholesterol and calories than red meat.

The pork industry, meantime, has spent about $40 million in five years promoting its product as “the other white meat.” The campaign, which touts the qualities of some cuts of pork, has worked to keep pork from slipping in popularity--much to the chagrin of some critics who call the claims “misleading.”

Beef producers, too, for several years spent tens of millions telling health-conscious consumers that new, leaner-bred beef could fit into a low-fat, low-cholesterol diet.

But that campaign may have backfired. Consumers seemed to worry that if beef was losing its fat and calories, it was losing its taste, said Mary Adolf, vice president of promotion and advertising at the Beef Industry Council.

And beef began losing many of its most-prized customers, beef lovers classified as “heavy” users who might eat beef nine times in two weeks. Moderate users, those who eat beef six to eight times in two weeks, were also cutting back.

“While we were focusing on our nutrition message, our base franchise, the heavy user, was declining,” Adolf said. “They were switching, almost one-for-one, to poultry. They weren’t consuming less meat overall, just less beef.”

While Americans say that diet and health concerns are a primary factor in determining their grocery-shopping habits, when it actually comes to making a choice at the meat counter, other considerations may be more important.

There’s price, of course. “Despite all the talk abut nutrition, the pocketbook drives a lot of decisions,” said Bill Roenigk, vice president of the National Broiler Council, a Washington-based trade association of chicken producers. “Then people factor in the question of taste and nutrition behind what’s affordable. If beef were half the price it is now, especially in this economy, I have to believe that beef consumption would be a lot higher.”

Not necessarily so, Adolf says. She cites eating trend surveys showing that convenience is a major concern of consumers today.

“They’re becoming busier people,” she said. “There’s more women in the work force, more outside activities were impacting their lives, and the need for convenience was becoming greater and greater. Consumers didn’t feel that beef measured up to their desire for convenience.”

So in its new campaign, begun in mid-May, the beef industry has shrugged off its nutrition message and returned to its roots. The group left its San Francisco advertising agency and turned to the Leo Burnett agency in Chicago--the city that once was the stockyard capital of the world.

Burnett put together a $21-million campaign, with pleasing visual images, down-home theme music and Mitchum’s unmistakable voice. It presents beef as traditional, American as apple pie, versatile and convenient.

At the NPD Group, a Chicago company that tracks consumer trends, spokesman David Jenkins agreed that convenience is more important than ever to consumers. “People do want to eat a little healthier, and they are taking less and less time to prepare meals, or not preparing big meals. Ground beef or roast is time-intensive.”

Jenkins said there hasn’t been a one-for-one shift from beef to poultry. Some of the slack has been taken up by frozen and take-out foods, he said.

In fact, many nutritionists contend that Americans should not be making the choice merely between red meats and white meats. They point to new guidelines from the Department of Agriculture that advocate far more servings of grains, vegetables and fruit than meats.

Meats should become more of a “side dish or condiment,” said Jayne Hurley of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, a Washington-based activist group.

Hurley said that the meat Americans typically put on their dinner plates doesn’t match the small servings of trimmed cuts of lean meat portrayed by the producers in their nutrition-oriented advertising campaigns.

“Trading in a half a pound of chicken for half a pound of steak isn’t getting where you need to go. You should trade in that chicken for a large portion of rice or pasta,” Hurley said.

More Chicken, Less Beef

Fat-conscious Americans have trimmed their consumption of beef and pork and dramatically increased the amount of chicken they eat.