I thought that this snapshot from BigPicture.com was pretty interesting … a nice summary (and a great chart, to boot).
click image to enlarge
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/budget2010.gif
Archive for September 3rd, 2010
The Federal budget … what comes in, what goes out … and what doesn’t come in but still goes out.
September 3, 2010If you want kids to eat carrots, make 'em think it's junk food … huh?
September 3, 2010TakeAway: Sometimes to beat the competition, you have to be more like the competition.
To better compete with the $18 billion dollar salty snack food industry, a cooperative of baby carrot growers is launching a $25 million dollar advertising campaign, coupled with new packaging to mimic Doritos and other salty snacks.
While effective promotions can create an illusion that a product delivers desired benefits, if the product cannot deliver those benefits consumers are likely to reject the product eventually.
Kids choose salty snacks from vending machines because they like the taste.
However, recent studies have shown that kids believe foods packaged with cartoon characters taste better than the same foods with boring packaging.
It should be interesting to see if kids start to believe that these newly packaged carrots taste better than regular carrots. Regardless though, given the choice most kids would probably still choose salty snacks over baby carrots.
* * * * *
Excerpted from brandchannel, “Baby Carrots: The Original Orange Doodle,” by Sheila Shayon, August 31, 2010
As America’s nutritionally-challenged youth head back to school, an initiative … is taking on the junk food industry with a killer snack food alternative – carrots. Baby carrots actually. In this corner – the $18 billion dollar salty snack food industry; and in this corner – the $1 billion dollar baby carrot world …
Spending some $25 million dollars … baby carrots will be packaged like Doritos, with three design choices (check them … at the campaign’s website, babycarrots.com); sold in school vending machines (already being tested in Syracuse and Cincinnati); kid-skewing slogans (“Eat ’em like junk food,” “The original orange doodles”); a mobile app featuring a crunch-powered game, now available for free download on iTunes; seasonal tie-ins such as Halloween ‘scarrots;’ a Facebook page; and TV spots that aim to portray baby carrots as hip and sexy …
… “It’s not an anti-junk-food campaign. It takes a page out of junk food’s playbook and applies it to baby carrots,” comments Jeff Dunn, Bolthouse Farms CEO and former president of Coca-Cola North America …
Can branding baby carrots as junk food really woo kids away from salty, unhealthy, high caloric snacks?
As Fast Company blogger Ariel Schwartz writes, good luck tricking kids into thinking carrots are Cheetos or Doritos, while The Atlantic‘s Derek Thompson points out that kids’ marketers have ingrained some tough-to-beat traits: “according to a recent study, most children say food packaged with cartoon characters tastes better than the same food in a boring wrapper. Seventy percent of what we taste is smell. For kids, half of what they taste is sight. Image matters, and it’s smart and overdue for veggie and fruit producers to advertise creatively.”
All the more reason why carrot growers are paying good money in the hopes that that kids can be won over…
Edit by DMG
* * * * *
Full Article
http://www.brandchannel.com/home/post/2010/08/31/Baby-Carrots-The-Original-Orange-Doodle.aspx#continue
* * * * *
The Homa Files 
