Currently browsing posts about: Food-marketing

Food marketing is on my mind these days.  It clearly is also on the mind of marketers at Pepsi.   What’s wrong with you women.  You aren’t buying enough Baked Lays? Pepsi’s research on your feelings about snacking and guilt reveals that you want foods that are healthier.  Pepsi’s answer to this problem?  New packaging, of course.   This ad is probably too small to read but here’s what it says: First woman: “These things are the best invention since the push-up bra.”  Second woman: “I wouldn’t go that far.”  I wouldn’t either, alas.

This must be the week for wonders of food technology. Michele Simon (Appetite for Profit) sends me this photo of this great new Disney product. And another writer tells me that I must take a look at Arby’s new Cheesecake Poppers. I can’t wait to try them! Care to join me?

Dennis Whalen, a marketing executive in San Francisco, forwards this link to a speech given in 2004 by Malcolm Gladwell, the New Yorker writer and author of the Tipping Point and other best sellers. How do food marketers decide what sells sodas and spaghetti sauce? Gladwell’s answer: in ways that make people happy. Really?

I’ve just been sent a YouTube link to the Peter Jennings special of a few years ago (2004?) titled “How to get fat without even trying.” It’s a remarkable look at how food company marketing practices encourage obesity. This is not exactly an unbiased opinion, since I am in it. More than that, when he began our interview, Peter Jennings told me he had read my book, Food Politics, and was basing the program on it. I was so stunned by this that I can’t remember another word. I wish he was still with us.