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Several of the entries in this section are legends about the implementation of simple yet brilliant innovations that increase the profits of successful companies many times over — everything from the mostly true (Alka-Seltzer's ad campaigns featuring the use of two tablets instead of one) to the completely apocryphal (an outsider's selling Coca-Cola the idea that they should bottle their product). Another prominent entry in this genre of marketing legends is the claim that instant cake mixes which required only the addition of water initially sold quite poorly because housewives felt guilty about contributing virtually nothing to the cake-making process — a stumbling block that was successfully overcome when one food company hit on the ingenious idea of eliminating dried eggs from its mix and instead requiring the addition of a fresh egg, thus assuaging homemakers' guilt by providing them with a greater sense of participatory investment in the results: Example: [Tan, 1979] Although there's a grain of truth to this claim, the legend that sprouted from it is a different kind of fruit: a marketing innovation did revive flagging sales of cake mixes, but it wasn't the innovation most people think it was. First of all, the choice between offering complete cake mixes (i.e., mixes that included dried eggs, to which consumers added only water) or mixes that required the addition of fresh eggs was not an issue considered by food companies only when initial sales of instant cake mixes proved disappointing; it was a point of contention from the very beginning: It's also not the case that initial sales of cake mixes were disappointing: between 1947 (just before the major food companies introduced their cake mix products to the market) and 1953, sales of cake mixes doubled. The problem occurred several years later, when sales of cake mixes flattened between 1956 and 1960 (rising only 5 percent during that period). It was then that the major food companies sought to find out why more families weren't using cake mixes and brought about the circumstances that gave rise to the egg theory: However, as Laura Shapiro observed in Something from the Oven: Reinventing Dinner in 1950s America, while Dichter's work was influential, its precise role in the success of the cake mix is unclear. For starters, although it may not have been a point articulated by the homemakers Dichter surveyed, the fact was that fresh eggs produced superior cakes. Using complete mixes which included dried eggs resulted in cakes that stuck to the pan, had poor texture, had a shorter shelf life, and often tasted too strongly of eggs. Chances are, Shapiro wrote, if adding eggs persuaded some women to overcome their aversion to cake mixes, it was at least partly because fresh eggs made for better cakes. Furthermore, the two food companies who came to dominate the cake mix market in this era, General Mills and Pillsbury, adopted opposite approaches: the former chose to go with fresh-egg mixes, while Pillsbury opted to offer complete mixes. If the form of eggs used were truly the tipping point that saved the cake mix industry, then sales of one of these company's products should have tanked in comparison to the other's. The key marketing innovation that Dichter's analysis spurred was not the fresh-egg cake mix, but rather the repositioning of cakes as merely one element of a larger product, an overall creation that entailed a much greater degree of participation and creativity from homemakers and emphasized appearance over taste: What ultimately ensured the long-term success of instant cake mixes was a declining exposure to the art of cooking. From the 1950's onward, middle class girls tended to spend more time engaged in other pursuits outside the kitchen (especially after the advent of television), many home economics courses offered at schools started teaching students to bake with mixes rather than from scratch, and culinary knowledge and skills acquired by mothers and grandmothers stopped being passed along to successive generations. As fewer and fewer home cooks learned to recognize the difference between from-scratch cakes and mix cakes, the longevity of the latter was assured.
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