After watching this fascinating presentation – you will understand why there was no audience applause – only shock.
Here is how the presentation begins:
“I’m going to give you some of the secrets about how we make you buy what we want you to buy. So, as a marketer, when I’m first given a project, what’s my job? Well, my job is to make you want it, to crave it, to need it, to think that it is the best innovation in food since sliced bread.
How do we do it? Well, I’m going to give a really big example later that I’m going to break right down for you, but let’s just start by looking at a few fun little things. See here we have Shreddies, an old favorite, been around for years. Very popular in the U.K. and Canada. Without changing a single little thing about that product they remarketed them, rebranded them as brand-new diamond-shaped Shreddies. Food marketing genius right there.
In the 1950s, there was a very important innovation in food: the instant-mix cake. One of my personal favorites. When they were first brought out all you needed to do was to add a little bit of water. Who’s not going to love that? Well, actually, no one loved it. No one bought the bloody thing, so they did a little bit of research. And what they found was that the main consumer, the target consumer, the housewife, felt that it was cheating.
They didn’t want to pass off such an easy thing as their own baking to their partners, their husbands, their families, whatever. So what did the producers have to do? They had to make it harder. So now you had to add water and an egg, and sales exploded.”
