Anna Bialkowski
The Southern Editor
Internet trends are becoming integral parts of our culture. While quoting memes with friends from Vine or Tik Tok is nothing new, trends have started to materialize themselves for profit and this is usually found among the younger generation.
In June of 2024, Haliey Welch became exponentially viral from a man on the street interview video. Answering a question with a charismatic innuendo, Welch quickly became known as the “Hawk Tuah girl” via the internet.
Despite the viral clip only being around 10 seconds long, Welch capitalized on this opportunity and has built an entire brand around it. She has started the “Talk Tuah” podcast, worked with Tennessee-based business Fathead Threads to sell signed tee-shirts and hats in the style of election campaigns saying “Hawk Tuah ‘24” and, according to Distractify, even has her own management team.
However, there is also something to be said about the type of content that Welch is putting out. Her weekly podcast “Talk Tuah with Haliey Welch,” hosts influencers to talk with Welch about, well, insufferable one dimensional topics mostly revolving around personal gossip. It’s stupid, to be blunt.
Moving forward into a more recent trend, there has been a significant number of criticism over a new Lunchable style product made by influencers Logan Paul, KSI and Jimmy Donaldson, also known as Mr. Beast.
Donaldson claims that the goal of their new product Lunchly is to make a higher quality product for kids to eat. Using the turkey meal as an example, he claims that it has over eighty percent less calories and sixty percent less sugar, compared to competing brands.
When highlighting the differences between Lunchly and Lunchables, a defining feature of the YouTubers’ product was the lack of artifical preservatives. What the creators behind Lunchly failed to realized, though, was the reason why Lunchables includes preservatives.
Shortly after Lunchly hit supermarket shelves, many customers were reporting the appearance of moldy cheese in the product’s sealed packaging. Paul and KSI responded to these claims in an episode of the “Impaulsive” podcast, where they laughed it off as people being desperate for attention on social media.
As a communications major concentrating in advertising, Welch and Lunchly both fall into the prime marketing saying of “all publicity is good publicity.” Despite all of the backlash for both parties, people are talking and commenting on these brands, allowing them to spread further and further. However, the two differ when it comes to their target audiences.
For Welch, many of her consumers are within the Generation Z and Millennial bracket. She has brought on several popular influencers onto her podcast, one of them recently being Jojo Siwa. While many people laugh at Welch and have varying opinions on her humor, her success has sprouted from fans that have enjoyed her content. Truly, to each his own.
Marketing Department Chair and Associate Professor of Marketing Matthew Bernthal related this type of success to a marketing term known as attachment theory.
“That’s simply a fancy way to say that people form attachments to those who they feel they’re like or those who they aspire to be like,” Bernthal said.
Bernthal explained that because of Paul and KSI’s involvement with the WWE, the primary and secondary targets of 18-34 year olds and 2-17 year olds, respectively, has an additional influence on the Prime and Lunchly markets.
I always thought that Lunchables was just for elementary, maybe middle school kids, but as it turns out, the target market stretches as far as high schoolers, primarily 15 and 16 year olds. These markets then translate into the buyers of products that form this YouTube trifecta.
Hate them or slightly dislike them, Welch and other YouTube influencers are taking strategic marketing more seriously in order to make a profit off of themselves and their fans. While the content they create is senseless and dense, the fact that I am the one sitting behind a computer, writing about how famous they’ve become suggests that there could be some merit to this marketing strategy.
