If you're anything like me, you watch your weight and what you eat, but you can always stand to lose a few pounds — or maybe 15 pounds. At any rate, you read the ingredients and the fat content and the calorie count on almost everything you pick up for the first time at the grocery store. More accurately, you skim over the ingredients looking for numbers higher than 2 or 3 and the ever present high-fructose corn syrup. The numbers are low. The sugar isn't there. You buy the product and feel proud of yourself all the way home and well into the consumption of your latest healthy find.

But you aren't exactly like me. You probably didn't spend over half of your life in the marketing world. If you have, by all means read on. You won't learn anything about marketing, but you may learn a little bit about that box of Kaschi in your cupboard. So back to the point... you aren't a marketer and you don't notice things like "evaporated cane juice crystals" and say to yourself "Wait a minute... what the hell are evaporated cane juice crystals?" Well, I'll tell you. They're magic marketing beans. They're "hey, this cereal has no sugar" crystals sending signals directly from the box, through your tired and not really paying attention brain and all the way back down to your money-holding fingertips.

They're snake oil.

According to CNN Health correspondent Dr. Melina Jampolis "Evaporated cane juice is pretty much just sugar. It is less processed so it retains trace vitamins and minerals but has the same amount of calories as sugar."¹

She goes on to talk about further benefits of not refining the sugar but I can tell you from experience that an ingredients label listing juice as opposed to sugar wasn't written with your health in mind. It was composed at an advertising or marketing agency with your health conscious, yet still a little lazy, buzz word skimming brain in mind.

Cane juice indeed.


1 Ask Dr. G., Glamour, 04/09

There's a science to selling things. We all know this. In fact, if there wasn't a trick to moving merchandise, I wouldn't have a job.

Marketing 101 tells us that making an appealing product isn't good enough if you want to make money as well. You need to twist the consumer's arm to complete the sale. But what about after the sale has already been made? How do you get people to come back and buy more? That of course depends a great deal on the product itself, but the overall psychology is the same: make the consumer want the product, and make them want more as quickly as possible. That's a basic principle of supply and demand. Sales is directly related to scarcity. In other words, if there aren't enough Tickle Me Elmo's to go around, I "need" one that much more.

I recently bought a box of Hershey's Whoppers^®. You know... malted milk balls. I'm a sucker for Hershey's chocolate of any kind, so there's no real science involved in getting me to buy these things. The psychology comes into play in getting me to buy them again and again at an ever-increasing rate. You see, there are new customers which are always nice, but then there are recurring customers which are the bread and butter of almost every successful company on this planet.

I noticed that my malted milk balls didn't have one of those handy little punch tabs that we're all used to seeing on just about everything that comes in a box. You know, the little tab that lets you reclose your box of cereal in the morning. Accident? Mistake preparing the die cut for this particular batch of candy? I don't think so. You see, I've been in this business far too long to see something like a missing tab on a cardboard box as an annoyance like most consumers. I see experimentation. I see a meeting with professionals discussing whether or not this "oversight" will increase sales. I see a box of candy I can't close constantly taunting me to have just one more piece. "Come on," the box tells me. "One more Whopper won't kill ya!" I see a sudden stop in traffic causing all of my nice little chocolate companions to plummet to to their deaths on the floor of my truck.

The psychology behind this packaging is quite simple. Get rid of the candy faster. Sell more candy. It's a subtle "mistake" that's actually a subtle sales ploy... and it's pure genius.

I need to go buy some more Whoppers.




Visit the Whoppers site.

Food of the Gods

I used to like SpaghettiOs^®. Any kid worth his salt loved them. Of course, somewhere along the way I lost my taste for soggy, canned pasta; but I remember just the same. Kids ate SpaghettiOs – PERIOD. It was the law. We all knew it. Somewhere in some forgotten land, like we had seen Charlton Heston emerge from with his cheaply painted wooden tablets for what seemed like a hundred times, the laws of kid-dom were etched in stone. At the very least, some worshipped older-kid-god had carved them mercilessly into the bark of some unsuspecting great oak with his grandfather’s prized Old Timer.

The weird kids, the ones who blindly ate whatever their mothers had prepared for lunch, didn’t get to savor those rare occasions when one meatball mysteriously entered the mix. They just didn’t grasp the true meaning of that.

SpaghettiOs meant defiance – months of it. A good eighteen weeks of refusing peanut-butter and jelly or the endless barrage of Oscar-Meyer Mystery Loaf would ultimately lead frustrated mothers to the can. It was inevitable. We knew this; and only the aforementioned weird kids, who also wouldn’t jump in Dad’s freshly raked pile of leaves, would miss out.

To this day I still don’t know if I ever actually liked the taste of SpaghettiOs. I do know that it didn’t matter. It came in a can. It couldn’t possibly be good for me. To Mom it was this or let me starve, and that’s where the pleasure came in. Taste-schmaste. Mom had submitted. SpaghettiOs meant we kids had taken over the world of lunch, and Bob Franco-American was our fearless leader.

As I got older and lost my taste for most foods with sauces of unexplained origin, SpaghettiOs eventually disappeared from my kitchen cabinets; but every now and then a can will mysteriously find its way home. Laughing mischievously at my unaware mother’s expense, I savor each unappealing tasting spoonful… and smile.



©1997, 2009 Sven Skupien. All rights reserved. SpaghettiOs^® CSC Brands LP.

Republished from my website of long ago, Svenhärd's Realm (started way back in 1994 when you had a really slow modem... if you were lucky). I don't need permission.  I wrote it.

Visit the SpaghettiOs website.