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There's guerrilla marketing, buzz marketing and word-of-mouth marketing, then there's just plain deception marketing. My coworker, Wes, tipped me to this little diddy about suspicious sudden interest in Halloween masks of the Burger King mascot.
Not that the character isn't creepy enough to make a good halloween mask, mind you. But is deception the most effective way they could think of to build buzz?
What are the six products singled out by by The Center for Science in the Public Interest for having misleading food labels?
Here is the rationale for each one.
Are these the only ones? Of course not. Are they even the most egregious offenders? Who knows. But, they are big companies with tremendous influence on what people eat. If your carrot cake is made with carrot power and not carrot pieces, don't show carrot pieces on the box. It's pretty simple really. If you can't make a product that people will want if they knew the truth about it, then maybe you shouldn't be making that product at all, eh?
More on my own frustrating food label experience here.
This is an interesting study - customers of McDonald's and Subway were interviewed on their way out of the respective restaurants and asked how many calories they thought they had consumed. Those data were then compared with how many they actually consumed.
The results of the Cornell University and University of Illinois study as published in USA Today are:
"The customers at McDonald's ate a lot of calories and knew they'd eaten a lot," says Wansink, director of Cornell's Food and Brand Lab. "But those at Subway experienced the 'halo effect,' which allowed them to think they were eating better than they were."
According to this article in USA Today, Starbucks is planning to run a religious quote on its cups in 2006 as part of a campaign designed "to carry on the coffeehouse tradition of conversation and debate." What I was prepared to write about is how absurd it seemed to me that on the cups is the disclaimer that the opinions "do not necessarily reflect the views of Starbucks." I thought, how can a company serve-up a message on its product, then claim the views do not necessarily reflect those of the company. If that's the case, don't print the message.
Then I thought about where else I've seen a similar disclaimer. Television networks, magazines and newspapers routinely make such disclaimers regarding content and I have no problem with that. If NBC broadcasts a news story about someone who advocates racist behavior, I don't then believe those at NBC are racist. So why does the Starbucks thing strike me so differently? And it's not that I necessarily object (or don't object) to the particular message. It's the notion that a message that may not reflect the opinions of the company is being used at all. Is content on a Starbucks cup any different than content on a TV network or in the pages of a magazine or newspaper?
