Al Gore’s surprising announcement last week that he will do a series of television advertisements endorsing Jimmy Dean’s Sausage left other sausage makers who had sought his nod disappointed—none more so than Tennessee Pride.
Company officials at Tennessee Pride, which has its home office in Madison, Tenn., not 10 miles from Gore’s Belle Meade home, naturally thought that, when it came time for the former vice president to do a sausage commercial, its brand would be the natural recipient of his endorsement.
“We were very disappointed,” said a notably subdued Larry Odom, president of Odom Tennessee Pride Sausage Inc., which has produced the product since 1943. “If he were going to go outside the state and endorse Dean or some other brand of sausage, we would have at least expected a courtesy call. I’m not that hard to find, but I didn’t hear a word ’til I saw it on TV.”
Gore made several appearances before enthusiastic rallies with Jimmy Dean, the entertainer most notable for his 1961 No. 1 spoken-word hit record “Big Bad John.” Dean went into the sausage business as a sideline in 1969.
Dean is the market leader in sausage, and has been for many years, but the Gore camp was quick to position the endorsement as a choice of a true favorite and not just an effort to catch a rolling bandwagon.
“I think all the talk about strategy misses the point,” says longtime Gore advisor Roy Neel. “The vice president just looked around and tasted all the various choices available and decided that Dean was his favorite.”
There was also speculation that the more cosmopolitan marketing strategy of international food conglomerate Sara Lee, Dean’s parent company, may have been a better fit with Gore than the hillbilly caricature that is the Tennessee Pride logo.
“Gore is just flat-out abandoning his Tennessee roots for the bright lights,” laments Tennessee Pride’s Odom. “The boy with the overalls may be a little too down-home for Al. We won’t forget it.”
