A lot of companies come up with elaborate pranks on April Fool’s Day.
YouTube had Snoopavision, where the website took popular videos and added commentary from Snoop Dogg. Yahoo published a faux article that announced the closure of every Trader Joe’s store, which wasn’t well-received by people who didn’t realize it was a joke.
But this year, no April Fool’s prank measured up to Hamburger Helper’s. The company released a five-song mixtape on SoundCloud called “Watch The Stove,” consisting of five different rap and R&B songs produced and sung by actual amateur rappers.
Hamburger Helper has been notorious for making comments related to hip hop news on its Twitter page, but many users believed the company had no right to do so since it isn’t in the hip hop game.
Inspiration struck and the process for making the mixtape began in August. With the help of amateur rappers and suggestions from its younger employees, the boxed pasta brand produced a bundle of songs currently making a splash in the hip hop world.
The mixtape, which has already been streamed more than four million times, opens with “Feed the Streets,” which sounds like what people usually hear on current hip hop radio stations.
The song’s lyrics, like everything else on the album, focuses solely on the Hamburger Helper product, from making it to expressing love for it. Every song is also free from profanity, making it a kid-friendly listen.
The second song, called “Hamburger Helper,” does not try at all to hide what the song is about, which is obvious from the mere title of the song. “Crazy” and “Food For Your Soul” continue the tape’s hip hop sound, and the song “In Love with the Glove” finishes out the collection with more of an R&B sound.
This song, along with “Crazy,” even has its own music video, which is available to view online.
“Watch the Stove” is not only a game changer in the hip hop world, it also revolutionizes how companies are responding to their audience and adapting to a new crowd by using social media. Ultimately, Hamburger Helper was able to successfully use input from millennials and create a product that would attract them.
What makes this impressive and successful is that Hamburger Helper didn’t just put something together so that they could get a short-lived laugh from their audience.
Instead, the company intentionally made something that people would want to listen to over and over again, drawing a sort of brand loyalty from them.
“Watch the Stove” will go down in history as not only a surprisingly well-made mixtape, but also as a new standard for other companies when it comes to reaching younger audiences.