The thought has come to my mind before. Working at a commissary, I am always surrounded by food products. I look at something like a box cereals and think "What if the company just put the word Cheerios on a blank white box, maybe with a small picture on the front of what the cereal looks like"? Will people be tempted to buy it then, even those who have been buying Cheerios for years?
Good point about the flu shot that I never thought about. I couldn't help but think about the subject of autism. I remember at a time when I never heard anyone, not on the radio, in person, on TV or on the internet even bring it up. All of a sudden, it popped out of nowhere, and I had no idea what autism was.
Anyway, great article, Brian. I will share it around.
Much obliged, pal o' mine. Marketing certain has many aspects, and like all things, can be used for good or ill. Packaging can be a good alternative to marketing products without diminishing their health value (some companies use colored bottles instead of coloring the soda) but also it can misdirect (making the cereal appealing because of the colorful character or sexy person, etc.).
Yeah, I don't know what's up with autism, or even allergies. When I was kid, I never heard of a food allergy, and even allergies to cats or seasonal factors was far less prevalent.
This stuff is so hard to track. Something you do could build up and not even affect you for 20 years, and it's hard to nail down causes when there are so many variables.
Cigarettes are a good example. It's generally thought of as a no-brainer that they're horribly detrimental, and exposing someone to second-hand smoke is all but utterly prohibited (at least here in NYC). But my grandmother sat in a small smoke-filled kitchen with my grandfather and uncle for 50 years and never had an ill effect. Even the two grandparents I had who smoked died at 84 and 90, and though one of them died of lung issues, at that point it's not unreasonable to suppose something is going to break down. Even if smoking made the lungs a weak link, if it wasn't that, it would have been something else. Meanwhile you have people in their 40's who die of lung illnesses who smoke. So there's more variables here, and it's not so simple as "If you do that, you'll die", at least in this case.
Nail on the head on that last point. We can say that maybe the younger folks who died from smoking just had weak genetics but even that doesn't explain anything. Bill Hicks was a heavy smoker and died at 32 from pancreatic cancer. Funny, because in one show he asked a guy in the audience how long he's been smoking and he said 50 yrs, obviously this was a guy much older than Hicks. So there's got to be more to the story than "just smoking". The plot thickens from here.
As for the marketing products, I think Propel water can prove us wrong on this one. Their grape-flavored beverage is clear like water and the packaging is mediocre. haha
Is it now? I'll have to read the label... may be a good alternative to Gatorade.