Twinkies: a Hipster Brand in the Making? by Ciana Wilson Hold Onto

Twinkies: A Hipster Brand in the Making? by Ciana Wilson Hold onto your trucker hats: Hostess is back, and it may be on its way to becoming the next iconic hipster brand. This past summer, 80-plus years of delicious brand equity nearly bit the dust. What does it look like when you deprive America of its Twinkies and Ding Dongs? A petition to the White House signed by 4,000 people for fear that “our nation [would lose] her sweet creamy center.” Hoarding. Boxes of snack cakes reaching prices up to $250,000 on eBay. Despite the melodrama, Hostess was ready to close its doors and auction off its assets, having gone through two grueling rounds of bankruptcy and much- publicized worker’s union strikes. Cue the vultures. Swooping in at the last moment, private equity firms Apollo GlobalManagement and C. Dean Metropoulos & Co. salvaged the iconic brand from extinction as the only bankruptcy bidders for the brand. That’s right — Metropoulos & Co., the same father-and-sons act that famously turned PBR into the choice beer of all hipsterdom, has been responsible for the brand that brought us Ho Hos and Sno Balls for a matter of months. Says Daren Metropoulos, “There’s a great consumer fan base that hasn’t declined. We saw a real opportunity to revitalize these brands, just with some T.L.C.” We’d be lying if we said we weren’t curious what Metropoulos’s definition of T.L.C. will translate to in terms of marketing. New copy on the website shows a different Hostess than purists might recognize. Twinkies are now the “snack cake golden child” and Zingers “lay it on pretty thick.” It’s a little irreverent while keeping the tone PG — even for opportune products like Ho Hos and Ding Dongs. “You know you love Ding Dongs if the sound of the doorbell makes you drool.” Pitifully lacking in hipster irony, but still pretty plucky for America’s favorite snack cakes. So are Hostess products poised to be the next big hipster product? Maybe. If we take a cue from PBR, the cheap, offbeat, nostalgic Americana qualities match up one for one, unless the new Hostess veers too far into the trap of trying too hard. What worked for PBR was a “no marketing” plan — so-called guerrilla efforts that helped earn them priceless hipster cred. Twinkies may be making their way onto grocery store shelves near you, but whether they will make it into the art galleries and dive bars frequented by horn-rimmed glasses wearing musicians remains to be seen. The new Hostess position is leveraging what we might call the “heroic return” strategy. Armed with the new tagline, “The sweetest comeback in the history of ever,” the brand is capitalizing on the high fructose corn syrup-fed hysteria of late. In a similar fashion, what gave PBR its boost back in the past decade were the false rumors of its demise, playing on the scarcity card that would later make them an “underground darling.” If our math is right, it seems that everything’s adding up to a tidy little marketing formula. Will scarcity plus heroic return plus American nostalgia will equal the next great hipster brand? We’ll know it’s worked when we start seeing Twinkies tattoos and hearing all about how great Hostess used to be — you know, before they sold out. .

Load more