The Taste Bud: Apparently, 42% of People Unaware Potato Chips Made from … Potatoes
Via PepsiCo.
Lay’s brand chips is getting a rebrand. Why? Because of utter stupidity. The snack company recently reported that 42% of its customers do not realize that its potato chips products are made from potatoes.
Sadly, I am not making this up.
Last month, the brand, which is owned by PepsiCo, announced this revelation in a press release announcing the rebrand, which will include new packaging and verbiage to include the phrase, “Made with real potatoes.”
The stupidity of humanity knows no bounds. Or maybe I should feel proud that 58% of my fellow Americans DO know that potato chips are made from potatoes. Well done, America. Take a bow.
“Now, with the largest brand redesign in Lay’s nearly 100-year history, Lay's is here to showcase that every chip is rooted in real potatoes, real people and real joy — and bringing consumers more choices with the same unbeatable taste, by removing artificial flavors and colors in the U.S.,” the announcement reads.
Since 2007, the brand’s packaging has clearly shown potatoes (see above left), strongly indicating that the, um, POTATO CHIPS inside are made with freaking POTATOES. They look like thinly sliced potatoes. They taste like thinly sliced potatoes. Do people think they are made from squash? Cardboard? Discarded furniture?
And what do these people think corn chips are made of? Potatoes??
The instant I heard this news, I was reminded of the promotion the A&W restaurant chain launched during the 1980s to compete with McDonald’s and its popular Quarter Pounder, the ubiquitous burger with the four-ounce beef patty. A&W’s strategy was to launch a burger that weight a third of a pound, and for the same price as the Quarter Pounder. The slogan was "Third is the Word." Easy win, right?
Wrong.
It can’t get any clearer than this. Can it? CAN IT??? Via PepsiCo
The general public somehow didn’t understand that a third of a pound is MORE than a fourth of a pound. And so the campaign failed. To figure out why, the chain hired a focus group to study the conundrum. And these random consumers literally had one urgent question: "Why should we pay the same amount for a third of a pound of meat as we do for a quarter-pound of meat?"
Can’t make this stuff up. (Well, you could, but it would just sound made up to anyone with even average intelligence.)
The owner of A&W at the time, A. Alfred Taubman, said, "Sometimes the messages we send to our customers through marketing and sales information are not as clear and compelling as we think they are."
Sure, blame the slogan. But it’s no more difficult to understand that one third of a pound of meat is more than one fourth of a pound of meat than it is to understand that potato chips are made from … POTATOES.
To its credit (I guess), the marketing folks at Lay’s don’t get judgmental in its announcement of the new branding push. They take a similar positive slant by spinning the revelation in a positive light.
“This redesign, the brand’s biggest in nearly a century, is a love letter to our origins,” Carl Gerhards, PepsiCo’s Senior Director of Design, Global Lay’s, said in the announcement.
Nice try. We all know what it is. It’s a sadly necessary adjustment to society’s utter stupidity. Now, pardon me while I go snack on some hamster chips.
