Chocolate Busters: The Easy Way to Kick It!. Jason Vale

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СКАЧАТЬ product. Does it work? I should coco! The people who make the decisions to spend millions advertising and sponsoring sports events or TV shows aren’t stupid – they more than know what they are doing. They know that if they can link a positive emotion or ‘feel good’ factor to their product they’re onto a winner – and, boy oh boy, are they good at it?

       ‘The Sweetest Things On Earth Come From Mars’

      (US Advertising slogan for Mars in the 1960s)

      

      Every time you see a chocolate ad, hear a slogan, see a piece of chocolate cleverly placed in a film or catch a glimpse of a glossy wrapper out of the corner of your eye when at a theme park such as Disney World, you can be sure that months of planning and board meetings went into making it happen. Advertising and marketing are a science and the not-so-mad professors are paid massive amounts to come up with catchy slogans and think up ingenious ideas that will lure you in and get you emotionally hooked. Bill Suhring, ex-marketing man at Mars and creator of the slogan above, was paid a basic salary of $35,000 a year (back in 1968!) to head marketing at Mars’ arch-rivals Hershey. To put this in perspective, even the president of the chocolate giant Hershey didn’t make that sort of money back then. Marketing was, and is, taken very seriously and in the cut-throat Willy Wonka world of chocolate, anything goes.

      SWEET FA – FALSE ADVERTISING

      In the UK there is a body called the ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ (ASA), made up of individuals whose sole purpose is to make sure that the claims made in advertisements are true, accurate and not misleading in any way. With that in mind, doesn’t it make you wonder how slogans such as ‘… Makes You Work, Rest and Play’ or ‘Gives You A Boost’ pass the strict advertising rules, especially when in a recent advert I wrote for a juice extractor, I wasn’t allowed to use the word ‘healthy’ in it – and that was for fresh fruits and vegetables! Somebody did once take Mars to court over their ‘A Mars A Day …’ slogan, claiming it was completely false and that no one product can possibly help you work, rest and play. I suppose arguing that work and rest are two complete opposite situations and it would have to be some kind of miracle product to act as a relaxant one minute and a stimulant the next. A good argument I would have thought, but guess who won? Yep – Mars!

      ‘THINKING ABOUT YOUR CHOCOLATE … THINKING ABOUT YOUR TASTE’

      One of the all-time chocolate mind-manipulation adverts has to be that of the 1988 advertising campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. The advert showed photographs of normal everyday images being transformed into Cadbury’s chocolate. The campaign was, according to Cadbury’s own literature,’ … built on the thought of chocolate becoming a compulsion, which a person cannot get out of their mind …’ They then explain that, ‘running through was the haunting slogan … “Thinking about your chocolate … thinking about your taste.’” As the campaign grew in momentum many different scenarios manifested. One showed a man in his convertible car and, in his mind, the badge on the front turns into Cadbury’s chocolate; another featured a photographer with a glamorous model whose shimmering purple gown turns into a bar of chocolate. The idea of the ad was to repeat the message ‘Thinking about your chocolate … thinking about the taste’ over and over again, until we actually did. They want you to have a ‘compulsion’ for their drug food and they want you to ‘not get it out of your mind’ – it is this which brings in sales. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point someone uses Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ and attaches it to their product or food. This type of ad not only manipulates the mind, but it also prays on our emotions. In fact, the biggest trick of all in advertising is to find a subtle way to link feel-good emotions to their products, and the chocolate industry really do reign supreme in this field.

      TCI FRIDAY

      Certain days of the week are synonymous with certain feelings, and none more so than Friday. Ever since we started school, Friday has had a different feeling to any other day – it has what can only be described as ‘That Friday Feeling’. It’s a feeling that was quickly exploited by the chocolate industry. So now you don’t have to thank that fact you’ve been paid, or that the week is over, or that you can let your hair down that it’s Friday – NO, now you can ‘Thank Crunchie It’s Friday’! Not only have they cleverly managed to link this sugar-infested, sorry, I mean ‘Honey-Combed’ product with a feeling that’s got not a jot to do with Crunchie at all, but they also managed to reinforce the message with the musical lyrics which accompanied the ad. If you can’t recall it, allow me:

      

      ‘I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know that I want you – want you.’

      A Derren Brown moment if ever I heard one! And if one Friday afternoon you do find yourself feeling good and just happen to ‘spontaneously’ reach for a Crunchie – WHAM, they’ve got you! The minute your brain links that feeling with that product it will search for it again, perhaps on a cold, bleak, boring Tuesday afternoon, for example.

      From the first moment your brain makes a positive connection between chocolate and emotion you’re in trouble … and they know it.

      This is why Mars has recently gone one better than the Crunchie gang by creating a slogan and a £2 million ad campaign that manages to link the product to just about any wonderful and joyous emotion. Yes, gone are the days where ‘A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play’, now we have a product which produces ‘Pleasure You Can’t Measure’. Yep, somehow this little mind-twister slipped past the people at trading standards. Billboard after billboard depict pictures and captions of moments in our life where the pleasure just cannot be measured. ‘Your First Kiss’ reads one, ‘Weekends’ says another. Ad after ad depicting some silly and many wonderful moments that you truly want to recapture, especially when you’re lonely or having a bad day. This is why there’s hardly a person on the planet who, when they’re feeling down says, ‘Bugger it, I’m having a grape!’, but there are thousands of people who say, ‘Sod it, life’s too short’ and reach for some chocolate. People don’t reach for grapes for one reason – the British grape industry hasn’t conditioned them to eat grapes as a response to emotion – and, oh yes, grapes aren’t full of unnatural drug-like substances!

      REAL CHOCOLATE – FALSE FEELINGS

      In an advert for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, one of the bestselling chocolate bars in Britain, we see a young boy playing Saturday morning football. The picture shows all the dads cheering on their boys, and one woman, his mother, doing her best to join in. As the game ends we see the boy looking sadly at all the dads. Then his mum hands him some Dairy Milk and as she does so, the caption appears, ‘You’re a great striker son’. His sad face turns into a loving smile and as he looks up to her the caption reads, ‘You’re a great Dad, Mum’. The ad then finishes with the slogan, ‘Real Chocolate – Real Feelings’. How’s that for pulling on your emotional heart strings? How’s that for linking massive feelings to their product. How they get away with this blatant hogwash is a mystery to one and all. I suppose the biggest irony of this ad is that the combination of drug-like ingredients which go into making a chocolate bar like this creates false chocolate – false feelings.

      AND ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES …

      Then, of course, you have the ads for chocolate which focus on another couple of our most powerful emotions – love and gratitude, often linking the two beautifully. When it comes to gratitude, Cadbury once again СКАЧАТЬ