In fact, is the question Lol-Miaou or Lol-Meuh?
On Monday, the Bel group launched this debate to say the least tasty in its brand new promo campaign imagined by the agency Havas Montréal. A local campaign for the family business of the Jura, founded in 1865, which is today a global heavyweight of the food industry.
In Canada and Quebec – where the company has been present since 1957 – we especially know its flagship brands like Mini Babybel and Boursin.
But of course, or more precisely, above all, there is … the laughing cow.
Centennial cheese, born in 1921 after the invention of “melted cheese”, continues to smile at Canadians.
The laughing cow wants to become emoji, because she laughed long before that of the man who cries laughing! (YouTube screenshot, Bel Group)
A French melted cheese produced here
Each year, no less than 211 million of its small points are sold in the country-and all are manufactured here, in Quebec, in Saint-Antoine-de-Tilly, by the Bergeron cheese dairy. For real!
“We started our partnership with the Bergeron cheese dairy in 2007, it’s been almost 20 years. We celebrated 10 years, ”said Marie-Ève Robert, Marketing Vice-President & Sustainable Development at the Bel Group, Division Canada.
The other two products of the brand are also manufactured in Quebec, in Sorel and Agropur, to supply the whole of Canada. The management of the offer promotes this kind of agreement between foreign companies and Quebec.
The emblematic cow now claims its place within the 3790 emojis of the Unicode consortium, which largely decides small drawings which are added to our digital keyboards, year after year.
The cat that “cries laughing” is among the 3790 emojis in the long list of the Unicode consortium.
Old enough to laugh!
Tired of seeing the other laughs – especially the cat – the cow wants to assert, in this new pub, its privilege of old to claim its place.
“Difficult to ignore the similarities between the most used emoji in the world [le visage qui rit aux pleurs] And our laughter icon, we hear in the message broadcast everywhere. Even the cat, known for its bad mood, was allowed to cry in laughter in our texts. When everyone gets along to say that it is the laughing cow. ”
“Since this morning, reactions have been unanimous: everyone says that it is obvious,” says Marie-Ève Robert. We play with that, and it is this little click that is interesting and that challenges consumers. ”
A petition that does good
Internet users are also invited to sign the petition duly put online on Change.org, where we learn, by going to it, only for each signature, the Bel Group undertakes to give $ 0.50 to food banks in Quebec.
“We have seen the opportunity to integrate into this popular culture there in a fun way, but it is a pretext to support our partner, food banks Canada, in the fight against food insecurity,” she says. Petition is an accessible and committing way to interact with our brand, but also to mobilize consumers for a good cause. ”
She promises that if the amount of $ 50,000 is not reached with the 100,000 necessary signatures, the Bel Group will complete the sum to achieve its objectives.
Here’s what the laughing cow emoji would look like. Or a cow that “cries with laughter”. (YouTube screenshot, Bel Group)
A quest lost in advance
That’s really it, the serious end of the process, because it would be impossible for the laughing ruminant to find his place in the official emojis approved by the unicode consortium – and the group Bel knows it. The international organization is unequivocal in its rules: it is impossible to integrate logos or trademarks.
Unicode, what is it eating-instead of cheese the laughing cow-exactly? It is a collaborative standardization organization, more precisely a group of people from around the world who work together to develop an open, evolving and universal standard of character encoding.
By standardizing the glyphs used on the keyboards of computers, tablets and phones, the body ensures that all the texts, regardless of the language or symbol used – such as Chinese ideograms, Spanish tildes, French accents and, yes, emojis! – Conseish correctly on all our devices, everywhere on the planet.
To put it simply, it is the universal digital alphabet.
In Quebec to stay there
Speaking of universality, if the management of the Canadian milk supply is far from complying with it, it intends to stay with us even if the agricultural regime threatened by Donald Trump came to die for.
In Canada, the management of the milk supply supervises everything: it controls how much we produce it, at what price we sell it and how much can enter from abroad.
result: to sell cheese here, it must be made here, with Canadian milk purchased at regulated prices. This is why giants like the Bel, Kraftheinz or Parmalat group produce their cheeses locally. In addition to respecting the rules, they bet on the know-how from here and roll the local economy.
A model that transforms 100 million liters of milk
The vice-president of Marketing & Sustainable Development at the Bel Group, Division Canada, is reassuring on this point: management of the offer or not, their business model established here holds water.
“We are really keen to produce locally,” she says. We have been in partnership with Bergeron for almost 20 years. At the time, it was a completely new business model for the group. Agropur then became a partner 12 years ago, and we also invested 87 million in our Bel de Sorel-Tracy factory in 2020. ”
In all, she estimates that it would be 100 million liters of milk that the Bel Group transforms in Quebec for the entire Canadian market, annually.
A refusal first suffered by the Putin
The Bel group is not the first company to try to advertise with the creation of an emoji. In 2019, Valentine restaurants had tried it by also launching a petition for Quebec gastronomic flagship, Putin, is illustrated.
It is not utopian since Japanese Ramens and Argentinian matcha tea find their icon there, but it is not a walk in the park. It had taken an extensive file of no less than 40 pages, prepared by the Argentines Martín Zalucki and Emiliano Panelli Terranova, to convince the organization that this pre -Columbian drink, the result of an infusion of dried leaves – the Yerba Maté – deserved its place among the small drawings.
Fleurdelisé also shunned
The Parti Québécois had also tried the blow with the fleurdelisé and had even made a motion in the National Assembly in 2021.
In vain: Unicode justified his decision not to accept new proposals for flags because there were already 250 flags of states officially recognized, in addition to a few regional flags or subdivisions – like those of Scotland or Wales. These are much rarer and require specific criteria. In short, the inventory was already saturated.
However, nothing prevents Apple or Android from adding their own emojis. You just have to keep in mind that communication can scramble between devices if users are exchanging symbols exclusive to their system.
Even if the cow still laughs, we can reassure it: since 2021, the emoji “crying laughs” is considered to be cheesy by young people on Tiktok. Perhaps basically, it is better to stay what it has always been: a free cow, which laughs in its own way.
