Why Jif Rewrote Its Logo to Sell More Than PB&J Sandwiches

"O Fortuna" is the sound of doom. Carl Orff's 20th-century choral epic has scored gladiator fights, football games and roughly every film trailer that wants you to feel like a Greek god. This week it is scoring peanut butter.

Jif has set its new campaign, "Every Jif'ing Thing," to a full-choir remix of the piece, its Latin lyrics rewritten to be about, yes, peanut butter.

Underneath the gag sits a real marketing problem.

Almost everyone knows Jif. On Jif's own figures, some 85% of people can pick its red, blue and green stripes out of a line-up, yet it turns up in just 4% of America's snacking occasions.

Jif is a household name trapped in a single sandwich. So it did the near-unthinkable. It took a logo untouched for 30 years and tore it apart.

In the new 60-second hero spot the three-letter brandmark morphs into verbs, "dip," "sip," "mix," each a nudge towards peanut butter in a smoothie, a protein bowl, even a bowl of ramen.

"Jif's logo is so recognizable that changing it felt almost forbidden, which is exactly what made the idea fun," says Yohan Daver, the Bartle Bogle Hegarty New York Executive Creative Director who reworked it.

For good measure the ad drops Jif onto a mock cooking show and into a creator's video.

Turning a logo into a menu

Reworking the logo is a strange way to sell more peanut butter. A new flavour or a catchy line would have been safer. Jif gambled the one thing shoppers already recognise on sight.

The tri-colour banner is revived, the dated drop shadow scrapped, and Jif To Go renamed Jif Dippers to spell out the snacking pitch.

The push itself runs across broadcast, streaming, TikTok, Meta and Pinterest, built by PSOne, the Publicis unit dedicated to Smucker, with creative from BBH USA.

"Jif has evolved from being one of the key ingredients in a PB&J to also serving as a delicious complement to so many snacking occasions," says Shelly Kowal, Marketing Director at J.M. Smucker, of the brand's first major redesign in three decades. Translation: stop thinking of us as lunch.

Why heritage brands keep doing this

J.M. Smucker booked US$9.1bn in net sales last year and will put about 5.7% of that, close to US$500m, into marketing this year.

That is roughly US$30m more than before. "We are committed to the portfolio and the spend of those marketing dollars as we move forward," CFO Tucker Marshall told analysts.

This is not Jif's first reach past the sandwich. In 2024 it spent Super Bowl money urging America to dunk celery in peanut butter, then riffed on "Succession" to push a chocolate spread.

Jif is hardly alone. From Old Spice to Barbie, the biggest marketing wins of the past decade came from brands that reintroduced themselves without disowning their past.

Every heritage name eventually hits the same wall, beloved but boxed in. The smart ones grow by widening how people use them, not by chasing a trendier logo.

Jif's bet is that its most famous asset, three letters and three colours, can do that job itself.

Whether shoppers actually start spooning Jif into ramen is another matter. But for a brand stuck in 4% of snack time, aiming this big is the whole point. If it takes a Latin choir wailing about peanut butter to get there, so be it. Every Jif'ing thing, indeed.