Knowing is Half the Prattle.

Monday, July 14, 2008

When is Vanilla Not Vanilla?

When you buy Stonyfield Farm yogurt. I got a "vanilla truffle" flavored yogurt today and guess what flavor it is? Chocolate! The only way you would have known that this is chocolate is to have read the ingredients. Does truffle automatically imply chocolate? Yeah maybe technically it does but it would be nice instead of throwing some fancy marketing name on it they could have just called it chocolate yogurt. I had expected this to be just some variation of vanilla that doesn't make a difference anyway. Can anyone really tell the difference between "French Vanilla" and "Vanilla" anyway? I guess everything sounds fancier when it's French. If it's vanilla, just call it vanilla thanks. Save you're fancy adjectives. I can gaurentee that this is the chain of logic that caused this to be named "vanilla truffle" went something like this.

Marketing Guy #1: All women eat is yogurt. We've marketed them into believing that all this sugar and fat is a health food.
Marketing Guy #2: Yeah but the only other thing that women eat is chocolate, brownies and cookies.
Marketing Guy #1: Well we have to move all this vanilla yogurt.
Marketing Guy #2: Hey maybe we can get women to eat even more yogurt if we make believe that this is both a health food and a decadent treat. Let's throw some cocoa into it.
Marketing Guy #1: That will confuse them enough. Brilliant.
Marketing Guy #2: "Chocolate Decadence"?
Marketing Guy #1: To obvious.
Marketing Guy #2: Oh hey the boss just called and he likes to call it vanilla because it has a vanilla base instead of a plain yogurt base.
Marketing Guy #1: How about "Vanilla Truffle". It's got that candy spin to it.
Marketing Guy #2: Perfect.

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