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Honesty pays

By Gena Tuffery, 2007-07-03 23:00:00
Originally published in Idealog #10, page 93

… and not too shabbily, either

Gena Tuffery

[Marketing]

We’ve had the words pulled over our eyes again. The Consumers’ Institute recently discovered five brands of Omega-3 supplements aren’t hugely based on Omega-3—well, not nearly at the levels claimed on their labels anyway. This seems a more serious matter than The Great Ribena Robbery: The Case of the Missing Vitamin C. People drank the purple drop to stay healthy, but many chuck back Omega-3 to stay alive—the National Heart Foundation advises recent heart attack sufferers to consume around a gram of eau de fish a day.

Yet it is the pub quiz crowd, who believed they were buying a substantial IQ boost with Omega-3, which these supplement manufacturers must really be worried about. People who are paranoid about how clever they are aren’t likely to forgive a company that conned them into taking fake smarties.

We don’t like to be fooled by corporations. We do, however, respect the companies that refrain from turning their product’s recipe into a fairy tale—even when that recipe is no more than a pile of flour, saturated fat and additives.

Unilever UK’s Pot Noodles are packets of empty calories with no nutritional value, which guys lean towards when they’re drunk and/or desperate. I say this without fear of legal ramifications because I’m not the first to do so—that would be Unilever itself in its 2002 ad campaign, ‘The Slag of all Snacks’.

Featuring blokes with a hankering for something a bit dirty, the slobbish and the yobbish risked face slaps and alleyway germs for a bit of Pot Noodle loving. Five years on, this brand has gobbled up 95 percent of the UK’s £105 million instant hot snack market—that’s an estimated 300 pots being downed in self-satisfied shame every minute. Guess the truth doesn’t always hurt.

“The pub quiz crowd believed they were buying a substantial IQ boost. People who are paranoid about how clever they are aren’t likely to forgive a company that conned them into taking fake smarties.”

Our pants aren’t necessarily alight on this side of the world either. Although Cadbury Picnic’s 2001 TVC began with the usual product masturbation—“Combine thin, delicate fingers of crisp wafer, the irresistible temptation of chewy caramel with the goodness of rice crisps [etcetera]”—it then threw cold water on itself: “And you’ve got yourself one pretty big, ugly-looking chocolate bar really.” This is as much as we can expect a company to concede that their product closely resembles a block of fossilised poo.

Clients don’t keep funding ideas that aren’t earning their keep and the Picnic campaign is. Last year AC Nielson ranked the Deliciously Ugly Picnic  (“tastebuds can’t see”) at number four within New Zealand’s chunky bar market—not bad for the ugliest competitor in the market.

There are other brands that dare to bare—or stay fully clothed as the case may be. In the summer of 2002, Sony didn’t bother imploring Kiwi youth to build up their thumb muscles for PlayStation. Instead, its PlayStation Tan spot encouraged potential players to disregard muscles altogether—keep your shirt on, draw the curtains, forget the beach. You’re a geek, ain’t it cool?

Sales said so.

This crazy notion that truth-telling reaps rewards isn’t new. Two of history’s most famous ads—Volkswagen’s ‘Lemon’ and Avis’ ‘We’re Number Two, We Try Harder’—proved that honesty pays the bills half a century ago. Yet this type of ad is still rare—even though it seems calling a spade a spade and a noodle non-nutritious is the safe way to go.

Products like Pot Noodle have proven you don’t even need a good product to make an honest buck and Ribena is a good product, if not an overly healthy one. If GlaxoSmithKline wants kids to drink Ribena—and to keep drinking it when they get to an age where they pack their own lunchboxes—they should just say, “It’s purple!”

Kids love purple, how else do you explain Barney?

As for the Omega-3 manufacturers who are short on stocks of Omega-3, you all really should have made a bigger order. Those pub quizzers take their trivia seriously and “Which five supplement manufacturers misled the New Zealand public about levels of Omega-3 in their products?” is not a question they’re ever likely to get wrong.

Gena Tuffery is Idealog’s senior writer

5 comments

Charles C

2007-07-05 17:41:37

Put me in mind of that Dudley Moore movie: http://imdb.com/title/tt0099316/

I still wish Volvo really would run an ad campaign with the slogan, "They're boxy, but they're good".

Jared Bothwell

Jared Bothwell

2007-07-06 05:50:30

What a novel idea - tell the truth about your product.
The late great Bill Hicks has a great take on this, check it out here [url]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gDW_Hj2K0wo[/url]

daz

2007-07-06 14:04:22

Still it wont work for everyone.

Nestle
We encourage mothers in africa to poison their newborn babies.


Jason Kemp

Jason Kemp

2007-07-06 17:23:57

"Do the right thing. It will gratify some people and astonish the rest." says Mark Twain

Astonishing is good to0.

Gena Tuffery

Gena Tuffery

2007-07-07 07:43:56

“What a novel idea - tell the truth about your product. The late great Bill Hicks has a great take on this...”

Yeah I know - in fact I find Bill Hicks' take so great I have his wise words on the matter in poster form on the back of my bedroom door!

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