I have a part-time job. I work for a promotional company named Inventa and almost every weekend for the last six weeks I’ve travelled around to Department stores demonstrating this spiffy little coffee machine. It’s been a fun little gig.
I have a marketing brain. Since I was little I have loved analyzing and psycho analyzing commercials. (I very clearly remember my four year old self being OUTRAGED at the shameless waste of GOOD peanut butter demonstrated in this commercial. “He’ll never eat such ahuge sandwich. A pickle? REALLY? What will the rest of his family do when they want peanut butter? DID YOU SEE IT FALL OVER ? Did his Mom made him eat it anyway?”
My marketing brain is always on. Worse: I think I’m better at it than anybody else (which is not true but of course I enjoy pretending I am). Last weekend I took a tour around the grocery aisle at the low-priced retailer I found myself at that day and saw this:
My first thought was “They must not hire people to write copy.” (and, yes, signs are copy) then “Well, they probably don’t pay them very well. I bet they’re not motivated.”
Instant wasn’t appropriate. On the same hand, neither is “cheese”. At Safeway that aisle is labeled as “packaged dinners”, which also seems wrong. And are they trying to include pizza in that category? (instant potatoes and vegetable-like side dishes do not a dinner make) .
At 1am, it hit me: “Boxed Pasta”. It should be called “Boxed Pasta”. I wish I’d been in that meeting. I would have fought hard for “Boxed Pasta”
On my way into the same store the next day I saw this, and realized the reason said retailer offers such (not really) low prices is because their in-store marketing/communications strategies are more of the “pull idea out of hat” variety:
Go for the good stuff. CBC’s Age of Persuassion did a really interesting program today. The topic was advertising categories and Terry O’Reily dove right into the finer nuances around ad campaigns. Absolutely worth a listen, you can find it here
