So I'm eating chicken and barbecue sauce. It's Kraft Honey Hickory Barbecue sauce. It tastes ok, maybe a bit too salty though, but then again, what isn't these days?
One thing that struck me though is the big letters on the label. It said "NEW LOOK, SAME GREAT TASTE!". I started thinking about who came up with that. Is it someone job to sit around all day and come up with slogans for BBQ sauce bottles?
My company outsources stuff like that to a marketing firm, who came up with the brilliant slogan "Moving At The Speed Of Business" for us. It was pretty embarrassing when we found out that it had been trademarked by UPS for around a decade. But not to worry, they came up with something equally ridiculous.
Now, I imagine Kraft, with revenues in excess of $30,000,000,000, probably has its own marketing department that comes up with this stuff. So it's probably someone's full-time job to continuously come up with these little slogans for anything that Kraft decides to put on a label. Perhaps there's even a committee for these things. Who knows. All I know is that someone, somewhere, got paid to come up with it.
Now this got me thinking about the circumstances that gave rise to this slogan. They might be sitting in a conference room one day, with a conversation that resembles this:
Quote:
Guy 1: You know, sales of our Barbecue Sauce division are down 2% this quarter. Hunt's BBQ bottles just received a major branding upgrade last quarter, we think this is the reason why.
Guy 2: Why don't we give our bottles a new look as well, then? We could use some new tri-color schemes that are all the rage with sports jerseys these days.
Guy 1: That's a great idea, Johnson! Let's get on it!
Woman 1: But wait a minute. If we change the colors of our bottles, will our customers get confused? I can just imagine Sally Sixpack strolling down the Kraft aisle at the grocery store, and seeing the new labels... she might wonder if we've changed the recipe at all.
Guy 1: You make an excellent point, Sandra. We should come up with some phrase or slogan in friendly language that comforts the customer and lets them know that they're buying the same great Kraft product that they've always bought in the past. Make it something like "New look, same great taste!", but not quite as stupid.
Guy 2: Excellent!
Woman 1: Marvelous!
...
Does anyone seriously remember what the labels of their barbecue sauce bottles look like, and could possibly be confused if they change?
I'm scared.
