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A hilarious post on Cracked.com today I had found through @AMBabka that went right in line with Tales of Deceptive Marketing, and right to the point, describes some of the crappity crap we find on our food packaging.

6 Ways Marketers Think We’re Retarded

I hope you’ll all indulge me in a fun experiment the next time you’re in the grocery store.

Buy one product – a simply food product with high advertising budget and marketing appeal (ie, an energy drink can, a bag of chips, a juice container, a box of snake cakes or desserts, or perhaps a frozen meal).

When you get home, keeping in mind that every square centimeter of space on this package has been lovingly designed by an artist and written & edited by copywriters, take a close look at its packaging and read the printed copy.

A few things will probably happen:

1) You’ll realize how dumb companies and marketing agencies believe we are. There are, in fact, only a few words and shapes they aim to draw your attention to when shopping for a salad dressing.

2) You’ll notice many of these packages are designed to draw attention away from the most unimportant things, like nutrition or ingredients.

3) You’ll quickly realize, looking at the shelf, the product being sold is not the contents, but the fine graphic art and words of its packaging.

4) Along with the above, even the brand name doesn’t really matter. Does it matter if “Doritos” were really called “Lays”, and “Lays” were called “Doritos”? It really makes as much difference as if my name from birth had been “John” instead of “Adam”.

5) Contrast this with other food products and your own perceptions of them, like produce and meats. These products have no branding attached to them, generally, unless it is Del Monte Bananas individually wrapped in plastic, or calling some apples kickass names like “Pink Lady”, “Honeycrisp” and “Fuji” so we can find their deliciousness apart from the boring apples. They simply are what they are.

Case in Point: Frozen Foods – “Hungry Man”

Every now and then, a product comes along that is branded to be exactly what it says it is. And “Hungry Man” frozen food is just that. Let’s talk about frozen foods, a highly competitive market with several brands fighting for shelf space. On the outside, you have vibrant, colorful packaging with cartoons, cursive fonts, promises of weight loss and perhaps a smiling woman or two. And the foot looks effin’ delicious. Butter melted over soft noodles. Greasy steaks smothered with gravy and veggies. Pure American goodness.

But when you open it up, what do you find? A plastic/cardboard tray with a wad of frozen mass, literally crapped out of the bowels of an industrial facility, through a funnel and sheeted with plastic.

When I’m hankerin’ for a big meal, I must choose the frozen food product in the blue box with the word “Man” on it, because, well, I’m a man. And none of these “Lean Cuisines” and “Healthy Choices” can satisfy my man appetite. I can’t even chew a meal that small, in fact, I snort Lean Cuisine as a quick snack in between meals. Only a woman would consume such a thing and describe it as a “meal”.

“Hungry Man” accommodates my male appetite with a double dose of Salisbury steaks smothered in brown salt and oil is certainly not going to fit up my nostrils.

Nothing inside of this box is any different from any other Salisbury Steak frozen meal. The beauty of “Hungry Man” is its elegant packaging which provides an extra generous portion of industrial food dump and describes its intentions plainly with straightforward copy and imagery.

So let’s take “Hungry Man” at face value, as men generally do, and have a grocery store conversation with it: “Ladies, ignore this entirely. This gender-biased box of food is only for those packing a pair, so move your eyeballs to those little boxes promising tiny hips and a newfound love of yoga and holistic health. This is for men, real men, who enjoy buffet-sized portions of frozen delicacy. This will rock your spacious masculine bowels with 1 lb., yes a full 16 oz., of microwavable delight, and we even threw in a chocolate flavored brownie you can chew like cud in front of your spouse as she sneers and daintily pecks at some lame frozen pasta dish that comes in a portion fit for a starving vagrant.”

They even trademarked the phrase “It’s good to be full.” Awesome.

If you have a favorite packaged food product, please write in the comments below or send it my way!

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