Mayo The Force Be With You

I was watching television the other day and I saw a commercial for Miracle Whip, the mayonnaise alternative that, as far as I can tell, just developed a marketing strategy.  Now Miracle Whip has been around for just over seventy-five years after it was debuted at the World’s Fair. And in my twenty-three years on this planet,  I’ve never seen a commercial for it.  I’ve seen one of my best friends hit on a wild deer, but I’ve never seen a commercial for Miracle Whip.  It seems that Miracle Whip has finally taken an aggressive team of advertisers to let everyone know that Miracle Whip doesn’t fuck around.  Take a look at this commercial.

Here is what we have learned about people who use Miracle Whip:

• They will not keep quiet
• They’re not like the others
• They will not tone it down

Now this is the kind of marketing that appeals to Western individualism and counterculture where the individual rallies passionately against the bonds of conformity and thus trumpet their hyper-individuality through their consumption of a series of widely consumed products.  Pepsi does this by saying they are the voice of a “new generation” or “young people who love the shit out of Coca-Cola like everyone else, but need a beverage that assuages the guilt that comes with bleating like the rest of the herd of consumerist sheep”.  No one can tell me Pepsi tastes better.  If you do you’re lying to yourself and God.  Oddly enough, God is a Mr. Pibb kinda gal.  I know, right?

Doritos has also done a similar thing by marketing to counterculture individualism by expanding their flavors by making them “xtreme”.  This allows people to tailor their chip consumption based on whether you snowboard or hang glide.  The newest Doritos flavor is actually called “Che-eze Guevara”.  The chip that tastes like revolution! 

But looking back at this new commercial for Miracle Whip, one might think this is just another recycled marketing trick that is being utilized by Kraft (the company that makes Miracle Whip).  I wouldn’t blame you if you did, but if you look more closely at the commercial you can see something far more sinister.  At the 00:14 mark look at what is sitting on the couch:  a hipster (see number four). 

**CUE SINISTER MUSIC**

Miracle Whip is marketing to the hipsters now!  Someone get in touch with NORAD.  Holy tight jeans, it all makes perfect sense:  the faux rebelliousness, the hyper-individualism, the allusion to rock and roll, the anti-conformity.  What is the truly genius part that will lure the hipster is the creation of a shared past that there are people who are actively rallying against Miracle Whip.  Oh yeah, I forgot about the Barney-Reingold Bill (1934) that forbid the use of Miracle Whip in American households which spawned an underground movement of sandwich consumption that has been raging in the underground music scene of Brooklyn for the past seventy years.  There is even a special unit within America’s military to make sure the use of this sandwich spread does not become a culinary pandemic. 

All kidding aside, given that there didn’t seem to be much aggressive advertising for Miracle Whip until this commercial, and also given the fact that it has been around for seventy-five years, we can conclude that Miracle Whip has been, in fact, surviving by word of mouth.  And hipsters love word of mouth.  According to hipsters, that’s how all of the best music is proselytized.  In fact, the ideal hipster music show would be from Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist where there is this amazing indy rock band that hates publicity and is performing a super-ulta-secret-double-stampies-no-tellsies-totes-for-realsies show somewhere in Manhattan.  The only way to find out about this totally rockin’ show is to have someone tell you.  Whoooooaaaaa (guitar riff).

Once hipsters pick up on this fact about Miracle Whip, I won’t be at all surprised ifthe next commercial for Miracle Whip depicts a scene of douchey frat boys with popped collars, listening to T-Pain and drinking Bud Light.  The lights will cut out at the party and when they come back on all of finger sandwiches from the party will have been taken (frat boys love finger sandwiches).  The camera will cut to hipsters ironically eating the finger sandwiches with Miracle Whip while rubbing their mustaches together.  Oh, and all the Bud Light will have been replaced with Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Why am I up in arms about this?  I love Miracle Whip.  I put it on all my sandwiches and it’s delicious.  My friends make fun of me for it, but not to the point where I’m a social pariah and have to set up a whole new set of friends that understand my penchant for alternative sandwich spreads.  And I’m concerned that Miracle Whip might be taken over by the overzealous counterculture that is hipsterism and I will be faced with a moral quandary.  What is more important, my principled distaste of hipsters or my joyful taste buds?  For those such as myself, we have a decision to make.

This post is for my dad who positively hates Miracle Whip and every time he sees it in the refrigerator his face looks like the dog shit in the vegetable drawer again.  My guess is that he would actually be happier if he did find dog shit in the refrigerator instead of finding Miracle Whip.  Happy Birthday Dad!