The Oldest Marketing Tricks in the Book – Guilt and “Good for You”
Stop the guilt with a serving of fresh produce instead.
I had been planning to write about our lovely adventures over the weekend at the beach and the food we enjoyed there. But then I saw two new commercials (new to me, at least) on television this morning that I had to discuss.
The first one was a new McDonald’s commercial that has gone a bit too far on the guilt scale for me to ignore. It shows a working mom coming home after a long late day at work, apologizing to her babysitter for the delay, and bribing her two little kids with “Happy Meals” to forgive her. It’s wrong to the “extreme” as Annie would say in her teenspeak. First, there’s the message that a mother should feel guilt for working late. Second, there’s the suggestion of bribing your kids to forgive you. Finally, it’s bribing your kids with fast food. Mothers, working or not, have a hard enough time with guilt regarding their parenting decisions. Do we really need a big corporation reinforcing that and giving us unhealthy suggestions for overcoming it?
Enough for the moment about McDonald’s because there’s enough sleazy advertising to go around. The other commercial was for a Kellogg’s new Fiber Plus Dark Chocolate Almond Bar. In this commercial, they show how they’ve replaced the ingredients in an earlier version of this bar, with supposedly better-for-you ingredients. The two that stand out in my mind are the replacement of peanuts with almonds and milk chocolate with dark chocolate. As these things go, the originals weren’t bad for you. Peanuts have their own set of nutritional benefits from fiber to vitamins. And chocolate should never be a large part of your healthy diet, but in the small amounts that we “should” consume it, I don’t believe we’re going to get much more nutritional bang for our buck with dark. What they’ve done is replaced the ingredients with more buzzworthy marketable items. Almonds and dark chocolate now make it onto all of the nutritionist recommended healthy choice lists you see in the magazines and television diet segments. The only improvement that I can see is improving the marketability of these bars.
Let me propose a couple of alternative marketing campaigns. I’ll use “peppers” in my example (see the glossy shot in this post), but any kind of produce will do.
The Guilt commercial: Mom, when you come home from a hard day of work, take your little ones in your lap and give them big kisses. Then pull out that pretty fresh bowl of cut-up produce you have waiting in the fridge, set your children around the kitchen table with that bowl and let them snack as they chat about their day with you. As you chat, show them how easy it is to put together an easy meal in 20 minutes that is fresh and healthy for them. You know it’s possible – there are enough magazines and cooking shows to show you how to do it.
The Better-for-You Commerical: We all know that you like to pull out these little, expensive packaged food snacks when hunger strikes. But now, snack on these beautiful peppers when hunger attacks. Antioxidants galore, fiber in every bite, and beautiful eye appeal. You’ll love what it does to your body.
Final word… eat McDonald’s and Fiber One bars if you like them. There are ways to make them part of a healthy diet. Just don’t do it because some marketer guilted you into it.
Comments
4 Responses to “The Oldest Marketing Tricks in the Book – Guilt and “Good for You””
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I wonder what a marketing MBA would think of your views?
I’m sure an honest marketing MBA would sell the products on their real merits, and would have no problem with my views.
I remember being a a party once showing off some new apps on my iPhone. I think from a marketing view Apple appreciates that and in this modern world I believe some people call that “viral Marketing”. Why am I talking about an iPhone on a food blog?
If I ,or friends of mine, eat at a good restaurant we share the experience with others by word of mouth. We talk about our great experience and spread the news. This to me is also viral marketing.
I guess what I am trying to say is that if there is good food well prepared people wil find out about it without slick advertising.
Maybe the slicker the advertising the worse the food. Isn’t that food for thought?
I agree that there’s a ton of viral marketing. I can tell you that I, as a blogger, receive a lot of product sample offers just for that purpose. The honest blogger will give their opinion, positive or negative. But my point is that I don’t know if you can always trust corporate sponsored viral marketing any more than you can trust slick advertising.
And why not talk about iPhone on a food blog? There are some great food apps for the iPhone