What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing
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I was also exposed to another strange aspect of cereal marketing: the sugar content. My father instituted a rule that we could have any cereal with <= 10 grams of sugar per serving, and so my sister and I became acutely aware of said levels. Captain Crunch was out of the question, but Cinnamon Toast Crunch would dip above and below the line, with a period of several months. Nearly all cereals I watched displayed this behavior.
I said, "I like to add sugar to my rice crispies" and she said, "You couldn't add enough sugar to your rice crispies to equal the amount in the frosted kind."
And now, it's hard to buy even adult cereals without sugar in them. They are all so sweet. It can't be good.
Ah, I love a good challenge!
The cereal, once you eat it, is gone forever, but the toy will last until you lose it/get bored of it/your dog eats it. Since your parent was buying it, it was like getting a toy for free.
McDonalds and Spongebob Branded food ?
When I was a kid, this just wasn't an issue. Food went on my plate, and I ate it. Sure, I would whine a bit about eating broccoli or whatever, but I never won any of those debates. So, I wonder:
1) Am I having selective memory?
2) Did I have an unusually tough set of parents / was I an unusually compliant child?
3) Has the level of marketing that kids are exposed to gone up so much in the last few decades?
4) Something else?
What do the rest of you think? Do you remember setting the rules with your parents about what you would eat?
Perhaps it is the level of marketing today though. All of my little cousins and nieces/nephews (big family) are really picky eaters, some on a level that makes me wonder about the parents.
I know all of those kids watch excessive amounts of television, and I never watched television. My family didn't own a TV until I was 16.
Perhaps it is the TV marketing of certain foods? I have no idea.
It may also have been the types of food I was raised on. My parents were on a big health kick right after I was born, so most of my first solid food memories consist of tons of vegetables, fish, meat and occasional bread. We had dessert maybe once a week, and breakfast was never cereal. The closest thing I ever had to cereal was along the lines of oatmeal.
That means that if I didn't care about a particular kind of food I didn't have too eat it, but on the other hand I wouldn't eat junk because it wasn't served.
The problem with eating everything that is on your plate is that it steams from a time when you could actually risk not being able to afford food tomorrow - today it just causes overeating.
Likewise. My hypothesis is that the kids didn't like to eat food that was hard to chew. Hot dogs: yes, steak: no. Beets: yes, carrot sticks: no.
The standard joke was that children would eat any food that had been "nuggetized". All we need now is a home nuggetizer to test that hypothesis.
Did that for boxes of Cheerios when we were out of the "approved" brand and it worked wonders.
Its too bad that we see more Kung-fu Panda McDonald's toys than Spongebob lettuce.
In the mid to late 90s, marketing became all about identifying with the customer's "core values" and "identity", they started making ads that neither told you what the product was, nor what it did, instead, they tried to make a brand "tribe", based on some weird interpretation of post-industrial anthropology, they tried to create a market segment where the brand was the central shared value of the "village", something more ideological than material. Marketing then became brand evangelism and market research was boiled down to studies of primitive emotions, love, fear, anxiety, comfort, family bonds, etc.
They swung back once again, and the new fad became humor, every ad had to make you laugh to create a private shared moment between customer and brand, so the next time you were at the store, you knew Frosted Flakes, Bud Light and Gillette Mach II were your buddies.
Then it's been about personalization and customization. Ads stopped telling you what the product was for, and instead, told you you could use it any way you wish.
Sometimes the ad would emphasize an sweepstakes prize over the quality of the actual product itself; you will be shown an image of you and your buddies rolling down Vegas Blvd on a topless '65 Camaro, smoking cigars and casino lights reflecting off of your Aviators as you stopped to grab a few ladies outside the Venetian and headed to a roof-top pool party where some sick tunes were being sliced by an underground dance DJ duo from Dusseldorf. Cut back to an image of four buddies on their couch in a frat pad, game controllers in hand, when one of them pops a bottle of Miller Light open and finds he won a free trip to Vegas for four.
You probably wont buy Miller to win the trip, but next time you're heading to downtown Cleveland in your buddy's 2004 Elantra, you will be stopping by 7/11 to grab a six pack and you will cruise down to the party, with the lights of chainstores and fast-food joints reflecting off of your Aviators. You will be associating Miller with "fun", "High Life". At least the people who the marketers study do. What matters is not that you find the imagery supperficial, yes, it's out of your reach and nigh near impossible to get there, but that you identify with the four dorm-room slackers in the end; "Oh, I too sit on my couch and play video games, Miller gets me".
Back in 2001 Smirnoff probably sponsored a local Baltimore rapper to sing about their product. Before then, Smirnoff has been a girly drink; a pre-mixed bottled drink of vodka, water and colored sweets. As soon as the song became a local hit in the D.C/Baltimore area, you saw all the hiphop guys started drinking Smirnoff. It caught like wildfire and people said they were "getting their noff on" .. street cred in 3 months! At the time, Budweiser was sponsoring basketball games, block parties and entire evening programming of radio shows. Smirnoff got more out of $10-50k out of that sponsorship than Bud.