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Hey Marketing Bestie,

Us Marketers sure can learn a lot from our Marketing fore-fathers and fore-mothers.

The greatest Marketing campaigns in history deserve to be etched in HTML stone.

Welcome to Marketing Classics 411, a new kind of ancient history.

In place of hieroglyphs, expect to decipher the campaigns of yesteryear.

Professor Millennial teaches every Tuesday (remotely), via electronic mail.

Class is now in session. Let's jam. 🍯🍓

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How Bonne Maman Turned a Jam Jar Into a Holiday Cult

It's November, which means 2 things.

Your inbox is full of Black Friday "early access." Sunset is annoyingly early all of a sudden. And somebody, somewhere, is refreshing…a jam website.

Every year since 2017, Bonne Maman has released a limited-edition Advent calendar containing 24 tiny jars of jam.

And every year, it sells out. Last year’s was gone by November.

(In 2019, it cost $34.99. Demand didn't blink.)

You'd expect a brand with that kind of pull to be all over your feed. It isn't.

Bonne Maman has sold jam in the U.S. since the mid-'70s. Its 1st U.S. digital TV ad campaign? 2021. Almost 50 years later.

And the French family that owns it almost never gives interviews.

So…how does a brand this quiet get this much attention?

It starts with a gingham lid, homemade details at scale, a jar nobody can bring themselves to recycle.

This is the story of… BONNE MAMAN.

A FACTORY JAM IN A GRANDMA JAR

The year is 1971.

We're in Biars-sur-Cère, a small village in southwest France, at a family jam company called Andros.

Its co-founder, Jean Gervoson, got into jam right after World War II, when he and a partner started turning unsold plums from his father-in-law's fruit trade into preserves.

Now Jean and his wife Suzanne want something new: a jam made at factory scale that still looks and tastes homemade.

They call it Bonne Maman. Literally "good mother," and a French term of endearment for grandma.

For the packaging, Jean turns to Pierre Roche-Bayard, a former schoolteacher he'd brought in to help grow the business. (Pierre would later help run the whole company as its managing and sales director.)

Pierre designs:

🍓 A jar in a patented shape, with 10 sides
🍓 A white label he wrote out himself, by hand (wish my handwriting looked like that)
🍓 A red-and-white gingham lid, inspired by the red curtains his grandmother cut into squares to cover her jam jars

And that packaging hasn't changed since.

Because why mess with perfection?

It was also a hit, from the jump.

Part of their special sauce (jam?) was the way it looked on the shelf: that gingham lid jumps out from across the aisle, and the handwritten label screams HOMEMADE before you’ve read a word. (The power of an aesthetic….) I know multiple people who don’t even know the name of the brand, but can describe the jar.

Another part of the success was where the money went. For decades, the family-owned brand paid itself zero dividends, investing everything back into the business. Even in 2017, Andros allegedly only had 11 people on the Marketing team. 😅

Instead of focus groups, they also apparently have employees take new products home and report back on what their families think.

In 2017, 2 out of every 3 French households were buying Bonne Maman.

THE JAR DOES THE ADVERTISING

Not long after they were founded, Bonne Maman debuted their minis: teensy 30-gram jars shipped to luxury hotels and other locations abroad.

(TBH, the minis are my favorite. When Ari asked me last year what brand I was into, I said Bonne Maman, because of the little ones they give out at hotels. I stand by it.)

Think about what those minis do (besides be adorable). You taste the jam on your fancy hotel toast, then spot the same gingham lid in the grocery aisle. It's a sampling program hiding on your room service breakfast tray. Annnd now I’m hungry.

Fun fact: outside France, the gingham lid reads as French chic, and it’s priced accordingly: In 2017, a jar of Bonne Maman strawberry cost €1.39 in French supermarkets, €2.79 in England, and $5 in the U.S.

Today, Bonne Maman is sold in 125 countries and is the top-selling preserves brand in France. It even made it on Muppets TV. (If anyone knows the details of why Fozzie Bear has a Bonne Maman jar, please spill).

Today, Bonne Maman is sold in 125 countries and is the top-selling preserves brand in France, #2 in the U.S.

The quiet family behind it all? Still quiet. They almost never give interviews. (That silence even fueled a legend in 2021, when a law professor's tweet went viral: he claimed a Holocaust survivor he met in the jam aisle told him the family behind Bonne Maman had hidden her family in Paris during World War II. Nobody has been able to prove it, or disprove it. and Bonne Maman's only comment was that the family keeps personal matters private.)

So, the packaging speaks for the brand. In 3 big ways:

1️⃣. It's recognizable without the logo. In the 2022 movie Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, the instantly-recognizable red gingham lids show up as tiny bistro tables.

2️⃣. It backs up the promise. The aesthetic says "Grandma made this." The ingredient list supports: lemon juice and cane sugar instead of citric acid and high-fructose corn syrup.

3️⃣. It outlives the jam. The 10-sided jar becomes a drinking glass, a spice jar, a pen cup. And the brand is obviously aware of the habit:

Every reused jar is basically a cute gingham billboard on your counter, chilling rent-free. Makes you feel like you’re in grandma’s kitchen just looking at it.

All this generates a jar-centric loyalty that runs pretty deep. 1 fan tweeted that Bonne Maman could sell them anything: "I would buy a jar of rocks."

THE ADVENT CALENDAR THAT SELLS OUT EVERY YEAR

If you were surprised that Bonne Maman has made minis since the beginning, this might be why: they didn’t start selling advent calendars until 2017.

24 minis, each with their own little door. It sold out. It continues to go viral every year. In 2022, the MoMA Design Shop stocked it, and Costco was selling versions of it too.

Fans learned to buy early. Calendars started showing up on resale sites. Bonne Maman capped orders to slow down the resellers.

And the price kept going up:

📅 2019: $34.99 📅 2022: $39.99 📅 2023: $44.99 📅 2026: $55.99

7 years, 60% price increase. And it STILL sells out.

The regular jars were doing fine, too. Bonne Maman reported $115.6M in U.S. sales in 2020, up 31% from 2019. The next spring, it finally launched that 1st U.S. digital TV campaign.

Shoppers know the lid from the grocery aisle, and the mini jar from fancy breakfasts. The advent calendar gives them a way to gift the feeling. (And try all the flavors. Just me?)

Bonne Maman launched their 10th edition (with limited edition spreads) on July 15th as a "Christmas in July" drop. (I know my brilliant wife would approve of them creating their own holiday.)

The calendar was SO successful, it’s now their go-to playbook, with gift-ready multi-packs for for Valentine's Day, Mother's Day, and even a smaller "12 Days of Christmas" set for anyone who can't commit to all 24.

And those empty jars are still working. TikTok is full of people turning Bonne Maman jars into iced coffee cups and pantry storage. Bonne Maman plays along, posting reuse ideas on its own site.

Crafty AND festive.

55 years in, the lid hasn't changed. And it's still doing most of the selling.

MARKETING CHEAT SHEET (WHAT TO LEARN FROM THIS STORY):

1️⃣. Same lid, every size. From a 30-gram hotel mini to a $56 Advent calendar, every Bonne Maman jar wears the same gingham. Each size does Marketing for the others.

2️⃣. Make the leftovers worth keeping. A reused jar keeps the brand in someone's kitchen indefinitely. Find the piece of your product customers hold onto, and make it unmissable, unmistakeably yours.

3️⃣. Sample where the setting sells. A tiny jar on a hotel breakfast tray is a free taste (in a setting that already feels premium).

4️⃣. Remix what you already make. The Advent calendar is 24 of the same mini jars Bonne Maman has sent to hotels since the 1970s. New occasion, same product.

5️⃣. Ritual plus scarcity equals pricing power. A once-a-year drop that always sells out let Bonne Maman raise the calendar's price 60% since 2019, and fans now shop for it in August.

YOU’LL BE IN GOOD COMPANY

Almost 2,000 Marketers are already in. CMOs. Social managers. Someone whose real job title is “Aspiration Activator.”

I don’t know what that is. But I’m excited to find out.

Marketingland Festival 🏰: March 4. Free, virtual, and the best-titled crowd in Marketing.

IN A MEME

Ahh, the bell has rung. Please be sure to do the reading (follow The Marketing Millennials on LinkedIn and me, Professor Millennial, on X).

Off you go, passing period is only 11 minutes and there's already a line at the vending machine that sells 1-ounce jars of jam (limit 3 per customer).

Until next time,

Professor Millennial