“Classified ads, catalog entries, and menu entries are all advertising, whereas headlines and instructions are not.” – Zwicky, Ann and Arnold Zwicky pg 86
Yesterday in class we considered several brands of potato chips with varying prices. The chips that were more expensive sometimes had nicer packages and were less flashy than their cheaper counterparts. The one thing that remained constant was the amount of words on the back of the packages. The cheaper versions contained little information, sticking to simple and clear statements, while the more expensive brands used sentences or even whole paragraphs to describe their products. Do we need more convincing to buy something more expensive? Is that why there were so many words on the back of my Terra Chips? To me, too many words meant a product was not worth buying. If something is worth buying I don’t need to read a paragraph on the nutritional benefits of, oh, I don’t know, Sun Chips, to figure that out.
For some reason, the experiment reminded me of the primetime drama Mad Men (it is on AMC and really good, check it out!) and after reading “America’s National Dish: The Style of Restaurant Menus” I was even more certain that I was on to something.
For those of you who have never seen this 1960’s drama, it is about an advertising agency called Sterling Cooper and the men who work there. There is a lot more to it, but you’ll have to watch it to find out! Anyway, in one episode, the ad men (Mad Men) are courting American Airlines as a potential client and are preparing for a big-wig meeting with them to pitch their ideas. At a meeting with the creative director, one guy shows his boss a menu he just wrote and the boss says something like “What the hell is this? I can’t read it, it’s all in French”. Of course, the guy explains to his boss that is the idea. People see that a dish has a fancy foreign name and they think they are getting quality grub when in fact all they are getting it…airplane food.
The funny thing is, people really do judge food by its name. if instead of calling foie gras "foie gras" we called it goose liver would people be able to suppress a grimace of disgust every time they saw that word on their menus? I don't think so.
Comments
can you come up with other interesting thoughts about food advertising language? is prestige and fanciness the only thing going on in advertising? investigating some more primary data would be good, whether TV ads, or the back of cereal or tea boxes!