Kerrygold’s masterclass in modern marketing: An all expenses paid trip for butter influencers

When Kourtney Kardashian – one-fifth of the most famous set of sisters in the world (sorry to the Brontë gals) – revealed on her Instagram account that her house is a Kerrygold house, I felt an immediate and overwhelming gush of pride. Our plucky little home-grown butter brand, built on the heroic backs of thousands of gleaming and smiling cows chomping away on the rain-soaked, delicious grass of this most emerald of isles.

It was like the time Saoirse Ronan went on the Ellen DeGeneres show and talked about getting her nails done at Tropical Popical, or when Paul Mescal bared his thighs around London in his GAA shorts from his days as a Kildare minor.

We are absolutely gasping for anything Irish doing well, sometimes to a nauseating degree. Kerrygold doesn’t need me doing a happy dance over a Kardashian using its butter to bake cookies. In 2019 it became Ireland’s first billion-euro company.

In the US it counts Chrissy Teigen and Martha Stewart among its fans and is consistently one of the top three selling butter brands in the States. So yeah, Kerrygold’s been doing everything right. Including a recent influencer trip to the old country.

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When I think “influencer trip” I picture the Coachella music festival – hundreds of social media stars taking outfit photos and fulfilling brand deals under the California desert sun. I picture swimming pools and ring lights and product placement. I do not picture tours around Cork’s Butter Museum and bonding with farmyard dogs.

So, when Hailee Catalano, the woman behind a gorgeous cooking page I follow on TikTok opened one of her videos with “Come with me from New Jersey to Ireland. It was so nice of Kerrygold to invite me on this trip,” she had my full attention. A butter influencer trip was a new one on me and was an inspired and refreshing change from the usual clothing and make-up brand trips that occupy much of the influencer space on Instagram and TikTok.

Hailee’s four-day whirlwind trip took her on a gastronomy tour of the south and southeast. She and the other “butter influencers” visited Cork city, Ballymaloe, rural Waterford and Dungarvan before travelling via Cashel back to Dublin to stay in the Merrion Hotel. As I watched her vlogs I kept thinking to myself “this looks expensive”.

Being a nosy hole, I had to look up how much everything cost, including Longueville House in Cork – the influencers’ base for the first leg of the trip. Honestly though, whatever Kerrygold paid for this trip it feels worth it. Hailee’s vlogs alone made for compelling and mouth-watering watching. She made Ireland and Irish produce and food look as good as any multimillion euro ad campaign.

At Longueville House there was cheese tasting and orchard tours and a complement of adorable dogs just dying for their TikTok debuts. At Ballymaloe House there was a masterclass in farm to fork cooking. The English Market in Cork got a mention, as well as the surprisingly enthralling butter museum. The group visited a “Kerrygold farm” in Waterford and a field full of Friesians, as nosy as myself, before being invited into the farmer’s own conservatory for scones.

I nearly had palpitations thinking of the amount of Windowlene-ing and hoovering that was done in advance of the visit. The Tannery in Dungarvan yielded more cooking demonstrations, and the stop in Cashel went behind the scenes of blue cheese production. A final restaurant visit to Forest Avenue in Dublin.

At the risk of sounding like a butter influencer myself, it was a masterclass in modern marketing. The comments on Hailee’s videos were mostly variations on “This is the coolest, most insane brand trip ever” and “Being a butter influencer is my dream”. A tweet about the event read “Never once wanted to be an influencer until I saw TikToks of the Kerrygold influencer trip.”

Influencers are supposed to be aspirational. You’re supposed to want to buy what they’re selling, but social media is saturated with identikit brand trips where the would-be consumer is left wondering why watching footage of 15 women drinking free cocktails would inspire a mascara purchase. A picky childhood means I don’t even like butter, but I still want to come out swinging for Kerrygold and this trip for making me fall in love with Ireland through the eyes of wholesome content creators. Now, who’s taking the influencers to France?