‘THINKING ABOUT YOUR CHOCOLATE … THINKING ABOUT YOUR TASTE’
One of the all-time chocolate mind-manipulation adverts has to be that of the 1988 advertising campaign for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. The advert showed photographs of normal everyday images being transformed into Cadbury’s chocolate. The campaign was, according to Cadbury’s own literature,’ … built on the thought of chocolate becoming a compulsion, which a person cannot get out of their mind …’ They then explain that, ‘running through was the haunting slogan … “Thinking about your chocolate … thinking about your taste.’” As the campaign grew in momentum many different scenarios manifested. One showed a man in his convertible car and, in his mind, the badge on the front turns into Cadbury’s chocolate; another featured a photographer with a glamorous model whose shimmering purple gown turns into a bar of chocolate. The idea of the ad was to repeat the message ‘Thinking about your chocolate … thinking about the taste’ over and over again, until we actually did. They want you to have a ‘compulsion’ for their drug food and they want you to ‘not get it out of your mind’ – it is this which brings in sales. I wouldn’t be surprised if at some point someone uses Kylie Minogue’s ‘Can’t Get You Out Of My Head’ and attaches it to their product or food. This type of ad not only manipulates the mind, but it also prays on our emotions. In fact, the biggest trick of all in advertising is to find a subtle way to link feel-good emotions to their products, and the chocolate industry really do reign supreme in this field.
TCI FRIDAY
Certain days of the week are synonymous with certain feelings, and none more so than Friday. Ever since we started school, Friday has had a different feeling to any other day – it has what can only be described as ‘That Friday Feeling’. It’s a feeling that was quickly exploited by the chocolate industry. So now you don’t have to thank that fact you’ve been paid, or that the week is over, or that you can let your hair down that it’s Friday – NO, now you can ‘Thank Crunchie It’s Friday’! Not only have they cleverly managed to link this sugar-infested, sorry, I mean ‘Honey-Combed’ product with a feeling that’s got not a jot to do with Crunchie at all, but they also managed to reinforce the message with the musical lyrics which accompanied the ad. If you can’t recall it, allow me:
‘I’m so excited, and I just can’t hide it, I know, I know, I know, I know, I know that I want you – want you.’
A Derren Brown moment if ever I heard one! And if one Friday afternoon you do find yourself feeling good and just happen to ‘spontaneously’ reach for a Crunchie – WHAM, they’ve got you! The minute your brain links that feeling with that product it will search for it again, perhaps on a cold, bleak, boring Tuesday afternoon, for example.
From the first moment your brain makes a positive connection between chocolate and emotion you’re in trouble … and they know it.
This is why Mars has recently gone one better than the Crunchie gang by creating a slogan and a £2 million ad campaign that manages to link the product to just about any wonderful and joyous emotion. Yes, gone are the days where ‘A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play’, now we have a product which produces ‘Pleasure You Can’t Measure’. Yep, somehow this little mind-twister slipped past the people at trading standards. Billboard after billboard depict pictures and captions of moments in our life where the pleasure just cannot be measured. ‘Your First Kiss’ reads one, ‘Weekends’ says another. Ad after ad depicting some silly and many wonderful moments that you truly want to recapture, especially when you’re lonely or having a bad day. This is why there’s hardly a person on the planet who, when they’re feeling down says, ‘Bugger it, I’m having a grape!’, but there are thousands of people who say, ‘Sod it, life’s too short’ and reach for some chocolate. People don’t reach for grapes for one reason – the British grape industry hasn’t conditioned them to eat grapes as a response to emotion – and, oh yes, grapes aren’t full of unnatural drug-like substances!
REAL CHOCOLATE – FALSE FEELINGS
In an advert for Cadbury’s Dairy Milk, one of the bestselling chocolate bars in Britain, we see a young boy playing Saturday morning football. The picture shows all the dads cheering on their boys, and one woman, his mother, doing her best to join in. As the game ends we see the boy looking sadly at all the dads. Then his mum hands him some Dairy Milk and as she does so, the caption appears, ‘You’re a great striker son’. His sad face turns into a loving smile and as he looks up to her the caption reads, ‘You’re a great Dad, Mum’. The ad then finishes with the slogan, ‘Real Chocolate – Real Feelings’. How’s that for pulling on your emotional heart strings? How’s that for linking massive feelings to their product. How they get away with this blatant hogwash is a mystery to one and all. I suppose the biggest irony of this ad is that the combination of drug-like ingredients which go into making a chocolate bar like this creates false chocolate – false feelings.
AND ALL BECAUSE THE LADY LOVES …
Then, of course, you have the ads for chocolate which focus on another couple of our most powerful emotions – love and gratitude, often linking the two beautifully. When it comes to gratitude, Cadbury once again get star billing with their incredibly successful ‘Thank You Very, Very Much’ Cadbury’s Roses campaign. When it comes to love, they’re all at it, jumping on the back of history. Back in the days when it was believed chocolate was a ‘cure all’, drinking chocolate was known as a ‘potion of love’. The Aztecs regarded chocolate as an aphrodisiac and Emperor Montezuma was said to down a golden goblet full of the rich, brown liquid each time he entered his harem of 500 beautiful women. Call me Mr Cynical, but somehow I think his sexual ability just might have had something to do with 500 naked women in his room and not so much the drinking chocolate! But despite chocolate doing absolutely nothing for your sexual prowess and being gooey, sticky and often sickly, chocolates in general are now an accepted way of saying, ‘I love you’.
Do you remember ‘All because the Lady Loves Milk Tray’ or ‘Do you love anyone enough to give them your last Rolo?’ or how about, ‘See the face you love light up with Terry’s All Gold’. Now call me Mr Party Pooper, but this is hardly a good way to express your love is it? ‘Happy Valentines my sweet, here’s something that will cause you to feel fat and hate yourself – well, cheers! I wonder if the advert would have had the same pull if the slogan ran, ‘See the face you love blow up with Terry’s All Gold’. Perhaps not!
ONLY THE CRUMBLIEST …
There is, however, one human drive which is perhaps stronger than any other – SEX! Whether it’s politically correct or not to say so, the fact remains that sex sells, it always has done and always will. Now there’s a fine line between sex and love, but unlike Milk Tray, Rolo or Terry’s All Gold, Cadbury’s Flake cannot fool us into thinking it’s all about love. No, if we put our honest heads on for a second, Flake equals sex, or DIY sex if we’re really getting to the nitty-gritty. One of the first ever ads to feature Flake ran the advertising slogan, ‘By Yourself? Enjoy Yourself – and that, was in the 1950s! Yes, it’s all about coming home, running a bath, getting naked and blocking out the stresses of the world by simulating oral sex with a chocolate bar. This isn’t my imagination either; it was more than a little deliberate. Thomas Krygier, one of the advertising gurus in charge of the Flake ad campaign, says they deliberately looked for innocent-looking women to front their ads. In his words, ‘You wouldn’t expect her to give a blow job!’ The idea, of course, was to illustrate that even innocent-looking