I’m watching television and an H-E-B commercial comes on … for blackberries?
I can’t remember the last time I ate a blackberry. Hostess doesn’t make a blackberry pie for moms to stick in their kids’ school lunch bag. Shipley Do-Nuts has 60 varieties of doughnuts — no blackberry. Reunited (And It Feels So Good) was a hit by Peaches & Herb, not Blackberries & Herb.
I looked it up — blackberries are only the 14th most-popular fruit in America. Blackberries aren’t even the most-popular berry, trailing strawberries, blueberries, and raspberries.
So why is H-E-B, the No. 1 supermarket chain in Texas, going all-in on blackberries?
Find Sweet Karoline blackberries at H-E-B.Courtesy of H-E-B
Then I saw the name of the blackberries. They’re packaged under the name Sweet Karoline – with a K — and, yes, that’s Neil Diamond’s original recording of Sweet Caroline — with a C — in the commercial.
Talk about a TV commercial falling into a marketing department’s lap.
First, it took two blackberry growers, Berry Fresh and Alpine Fresh, working together, about 15 years to develop Sweet Karoline blackberries, which live up to their name — they’re super sweet. The companies approached H-E-B, who bought the entire crop allotted to Texas.
Now it was up to H-E-B’s marketing department. How do they get the message out that you’ve got to give these blackberries a try, they’re a game-changer, the best darn blackberries you’ve ever tasted?
Well, there is this somewhat popular song called Sweet Caroline. It’s sung in the eighth inning at Boston Red Sox baseball games, during Carolina Panthers NFL games, at Iowa State and University of Pittsburgh football games, at Ottawa Otters hockey games, at English soccer games, at the U.S. Open tennis tournament, and even European darts competitions. Sweet Caroline is part of the National Recording Registry in the Library of Congress and inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame.
Around the world, people can name that song in one note. Good times never seemed so good.
So how does H-E-B go about getting permission to use Sweet Caroline in a TV commercial?
“There are rare occasions when everything sort of lines up,” said Ashwin Nathan, H-E-B’s vice-president of marketing. “We thought it would be great if we could use that song because the name is so similar to the product. The first checkpoint was seeing if another retailer had used the song in recent years. We don’t want the customer associating our commercial with a different company’s product. We were clear that no other retailer in Texas had used the song in recent years.”
Next was a decision: did H-E-B want a generic version of the song or did it have to be Neil Diamond’s original from 1969?
“There are some songs that you don’t want to touch and this is one of those. We had to use the original,” Nathan said.
H-E-B put a call into Neil Diamond’s music publisher.
“Neil Diamond’s people were very quick. We had a budget that we were willing to pay. I think it took about 10 days for us to reach a deal. There are some instances where we are interested in using a song in a commercial and it takes months. But this time it went fast. We were super grateful for that.”
Speed was a necessity in the case of Sweet Karoline/Caroline because blackberries are a seasonal fruit. They will disappear from the produce aisle in June.
I mentioned to Nathan that Neil Diamond has another hit song called Cherry Cherry. Maybe H-E-B could start an entire Neil Diamond fruit section?
