The video, produced and directed by Funny or Die, stars actor
Anna Faris comically reading and reacting to reviews Kind says it
pulled from actual customer comments about other brands' bars.
Lines include, "These taste like garbage and resentment. My
roommate just asked, 'did someone just s*** in my mouth?'" Another
review she reads refers to an unnamed bar as "hyena crap."
"Some of those reviews were just too good to leave alone, they
were just hysterical," says Drew Nannis, Kind's VP of integrated
communications. "There's certainly an element of humor there that
we haven't explored in the past." He adds that "this may be the
first time we've had somebody openly swear in a video we're pushing
out."
It's an edgier take from Kind, but the overall idea doesn't
stray too far from other campaigns. Kind, which got a minority
investment from Mars in late 2017, likes to position itself as a
challenger to established brands, and often calls out competitors
when announcing its own products. Last year, it dumped a
giant display of mock sugar in Times Square to promote that its
fruit snacks contain no added sugar but that some competing brands
do.
Now, Kind is focusing on what it describes as the often chalky,
synthetic tastes of bars with primary ingredients such as protein
blends. Kind plans to send the first 10,000 people who sign up
online one of four competing bars of their choosing—Quest
Peanut Butter Supreme, ThinkThin Lemon Delight, Clif Builder's
Cookies 'N Cream or Power Crunch Red Velvet—plus a Kind
Protein bar to do their own taste tests.
There have also been more traditional in-person events. Earlier
this month, 99 percent of taste-test participants in Miami and 93
percent of those sampling the products in Orange County, California
chose the Kind Protein bar over a competing product, Nannis
claims.