The Un&Marketing And Re&Marketing Of Whole Foods - Co.Exist
If you are like most people, you have passed by a Whole Foods Market, stopped into a Whole Foods Market, and heard the joke about Whole Paycheck, but you’ve never seen an advertisement for Whole Foods Market. That’s because, as an organization that hates marketing so much it should probably just drop "Market" from its eponymous name, it is one of the only consumer product companies in the Fortune 500 that has never run national ads. The campaign is a direct result of Whole Foods’ awful performance on Wall Street in 2014, which has dragged down most other natural foods stocks, too. Although iconic, brilliantly run, highly profitable, dividend-paying, and still expanding fast, Whole Foods saw its same-store, year-over-year sales growth slide and missed its earnings targets for three quarters. This was finally rewarded by investors with a 19% plunge in the stock price on May 7. WFM was the single worst performing stock in all of the S&P 500 in May, and its 34% year-to-date drop is enough to make the kombucha start bubbling back up from... How about the company’s first-ever national ad campaign, all united by the tagline: Values Matter. Still, as a shareholder of Whole Foods—and of rival Sprouts Farmers Market, which has also seen its stock pummeled by the decline of the market. Source: www.fastcoexist.com
