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Mass Marketing via Selectivism? Grey Poupon Tries to Draw You In By Excluding You

Grey Poupon’s new Facebook campaign actually prohibits users from “Liking” its page.

On Wednesday, the high-end Dijon mustard company launched a brand new Facebook campaign for those users with enough “taste” to be worthy of Grey Poupon. In order to become a fan of Grey Poupon’s Facebook page one must apply for membership through an application on the page called The Society Of Good Taste. This app scans your Facebook page to learn more about your interests, friends and writing style and from this, it automatically assigns you a score which determines whether your tastes are refined enough to be a Grey Poupon fan. If you attempt to circumnavigate this measure and like the page outright, Grey Poupon will simply delete you as a fan.

Exclusivity is the goal.

Says Tom Markham of Crispin Porter Bogusky, who designed the ad campaign and manages Grey Poupon’s Facebook Page: “It is definitely counter-intuitive, but it came from a place of seeing a lot of very cliched brand pages on Facebook that all kind of look the same and are desperate for fans. We based our Facebook Page on quality over quantity.”

Currently, Grey Poupon has over 23,000 fans. This is a far cry from huge brands like Coca-Cola, Starbucks, and Red Bull, with over 30 million fans each, respectively. However, Markham believes that by making the page exclusive, it will encourage engagement by virtue of the fact that fans “had to earn that position.” Says Markham, ”It’s a gamble. But we feel like it’s something worth doing because it is so different.”

What do you think? Does exclusivity make you crave inclusion? Or does it simply turn you off the product?