Cheap Chips equals health dip

Potato Chips. An American Staple. Ever sense I can remember I have love these thin, crunchy, potato-E goodness that melts in your mouth making it beg for a cup of water to flash flood the surprised desert. As I have grown up my favorite types of potato chips have changed from simple to slightly less simple, and the packages that I have found myself owning have followed this same trend.

Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky explore the different methods of packaging and advertising that potato chip companies use to market their product to different groups. As I am sure a lot of people can personally attest to, a high end pita chip bag will not look and sound like a bag of Lay’s. For example you will not find the word “organic” anywhere on a bag of Lay’s, but it might be the biggest word on a different brand purchased at Whole Foods or another organic crazed shopping market. In fact, the conversation of ingredients placed on bags is something almost never found on cheaper bags of chips. 

They get around this by saying things like, “What gives our chips their exceptional great taste? It’s no secret. It’s the way they’re made!” In fact, lower-end chip brands almost always rely on two main catagories for explaining their product’s validity; historicity and location. Neither of those two subject have any weight in determining how something tastes or how it affects your health.

On the other side of things, high end chip bags rely on three main ways of communicating what their 

chips are about; naturalness, ingredients, and process. All three of these things have everything to do with how a food will taste and what it will do to your body. People with enough money to buy upper-end chips or most concerned with their health are likely more educated and will be able to spot the weightless marketing strategies that lower-end chips propose.

You could apply this method to a lot of things. The evidence is pretty clear from this article that the more educated the people you are marketing to the more legitimate everything you say must be. You can’t bee-ess someone who is actually looking for a healthier option with better ingredients. On the contrary someone who is looking for some grease fuel, like an individual that is okay with eating twinkies, you know you don’t really need to say much about ingredients or health benefits for them to buy your product. Instead you must emphasize making the package look appealing with bright colors and inviting pictures of the food you are trying to sell.

An example I have seen in my life that is non-food related of this is in basketball shoes. An expensive pair of Nikes runs at over $100 and rely on commenting on the weight of the shoe and descriptions of the different types of in-sole cushioning that it has, an approach that is more or less using logos as its primary appeal (although the other appeals are used all the time as well). A pair of Starbury basketball shoes runs at under $25 and they rely on no evidence on any idea of their shoes quality but instead solely rely on the ethos of their company representative, ex-NBA point guard Stephon Marbury. Because of this you will never see any basketball player past middle school wearing Starbury’s but will see Nike’s on NBA players well into the future, much like you will not see a serious eater (one who is health conscious and ingredient conscious) eating a bag of Lay’s regularly.