
What My Five-Year-Old Son Taught Me About Marketing - jmonegro
http://www.copyblogger.com/inner-child-marketing/
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gcheong
I still remember as a kid walking down the cereal aisle and looking for which
cereals had the best toys. That was the entire basis for how I chose cereal at
that age.

~~~
qeorge
Kids cereal marketing is fascinating, from the toys to the way the mascot's
eyes tend to look down [1]. I didn't get to make a lot of decisions as a kid,
but cereal was one of them.

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.

[1] <http://i30.tinypic.com/2598znp.jpg>

~~~
fnid
The "Tooth Lady" who came to my school and taught us how to brush and showed
us those gross movies of squirming plaque bacteria told us that any sugar at
all in cereal is pretty bad. I was worried because I added sugar to my cereals
that didn't have it. Mom never bought cereals with sugar added.

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.

~~~
jjs
> _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."_

Ah, I love a good challenge!

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jacquesm
Maybe they should go and buy a cookbook and cook their kid a proper meal every
now and then ?

McDonalds and Spongebob Branded food ?

~~~
dstorrs
I've often wondered about this...I know several parents of small children, and
all of them have trouble getting their kids to eat. After a while, the parents
get tired of the fight and they let the kid eat what they want--often pasta or
such--instead of what the parent wants to serve them.

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?

~~~
ryanwaggoner
My money is on #3, plus #4 - There are _tremendously_ more varieties of
prepackaged imitation food crap available today than there were a few decades
ago, because growth and profits in the food industry are in processed food. So
kids today have a huge smorgasbord of junk food being created for them and
marketed directly to them. Parents almost don't stand a chance.

~~~
nopassrecover
Yeah but there was a still sizable smorgasbord of junk food being created and
marketed to us as kids too. We were well aware of different
chocolates/biscuits/soft drink/fast food and while some kids still got this
kind of stuff (much to the envy of most of the class) most kids were forced to
eat basic prepared foods. In contrast, these days I meet kids who can't recall
ever drinking water (always a soft drink or milk). Is it perhaps that the
parents of the current generation were the first to grow up as children with
fast food they couldn't have and so enable their kids (perhaps without
conscious thought) to have what they couldnt?

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aarghh
This made me cringe. The article may be revealing a simple truth, but it makes
me profoundly uncomfortable to think that this is what modern marketing is
based on. I would hope effective marketing communicates the value that a
product has - if not, you're making a sale, but do you have a real customer?

~~~
mahmud
Marketing itself is not immune to marketing; they go through waves of
"methods" and "best practices" fads, usually initiated by a handful few
industry gurus.

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.

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mkfort
Spongebob squarepants kraft dinner is better than the regular as long as you
don't cook it too long.

