One of the worst kept secrets in the food business is that taste, nutrition, and such aren't quite as important to sales as customers and manufacturers might pretend. Food and drink is a marketer's game. And perhaps no other industry does marketing quite as well as the food industry.
And interestingly, given just how obsessed we are as an industry with entrepreneurs and innovation, the greatest marketers in the business tend to work for the older, established companies. Here are our picks for five top marketing moves of 2014, and each one of them was made by one of the biggest companies in the industry.
Activia and Shakira
If you spent anytime at all online this summer, you might have spent some time looking at Shakira's hips. You were far from alone.
Yogurt brand Activia, owned by Danone, partnered with the singer/dancer to create a video to promote the United Nation's World Food Programme and its School Meals initiative. By August, it had become the most shared video commercial in history.
Cheerios and the gay family
Cheerios shook up the marketing world (and upset some people) with an ad in 2013 that featured an interracial family. This year the cereal brand took things one step further by running an ad with a gay couple and their adopted child.
But it only ran in Canada. It will be interesting to see if the U.S. will get its own version in 2015.
Coke and America
It wasn't just the interracial Cheerios ad that generated some genuinely ugly social media responses. Coke got a similar response from some corners when it ran an ad that included nonwhite folks singing America the Beautiful in languages other than English.
But the ugliness unleashed by Coke's Super Bowl ad only highlighted the beauty of the song itself, and seemed to position Coke as an advocate for a nation that lives up to its potential as a land of diversity.
Heineken and the Legends
The brewer's "Legends" campaign has been around for a while now, running in various versions in multiple languages globally. And there's something ceaselessly cool about the campaign.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity apparently thought so too - it named Heineken the Creative Marketer of the Year.
Oreos and small towns
Nowhere in the food industry is the power of marketing more apparent than in the world of the sandwich cookie. There are loads of those things, and more are coming. Yet Oreo manages to stay on top year after year.
That's because the folks at Mondelez know how to market. And this year was no exception. When the company wanted to boost awareness of its Oreo Minis product, it shipped tiny boxes of Oreos to the residents of the 50 smallest towns in America.
The little cookies were a big hit with the media, which gave Mondelez extensive press coverage of the stunt.