Time for some dark truths about marketing

Been thinking about how easy it is to manipulate perception. Especially in food.
You don’t need to change the product. Just how it’s framed.

Make it harder, it will sell better.

I read about the cake mixes in the ‘50s.
They were too convenient. Just add water. Adoption’s not great… not because the cakes were bad, but because the buyers felt guilty. It felt like cheating.

Perception of baking was that you gotta put in lots of effort, it gets messy etc etc… but this was too easy.

So they made it a bit harder. Now you had to crack an egg.

Suddenly it felt like baking again. Sales went up.

That’s what marketing does. It finds the emotional gap then builds a bridge over it with language.

Dark side of marketing

When people think of chickens, cows, lifestock… they still imagine some rustic farm, sunshine, grass.
No one wants to picture a metal enclosure with 4,000 birds packed into a room the size of a small movie theatre.
But that’s the reality. And the marketing industry’s job is to cover that gap… to keep the nice picture in your head.

So we use words like “farm-fresh,” “natural,” “butcher’s choice.”
They don’t actually mean anything. Who can provide real definitions? But they work… as triggers.
They make people feel better, and that’s all we need to do to keep selling.

Design helps too. You can put huge distracting typefaces and imagery to mask certain compulsory regulator instructed texts that they force you to put on your packaging.

no one reads fine print.

When diseases spread in these farms, which they do… half the world’s antibiotics go to livestock.

But that sounds bad.

So the messaging shifts. Now it’s “veterinary innovation” or “improved animal health protocols.”

Same practice. Different language.

Start them young

Look at the cereal industry. They start marketing to us when we were kids, 10,20,30 years ago… through whatever medium of communications existed back then. For me, it’s saturday morning cartoons, interlaced with ads about cereal to the point I thought it was normal to eat cereal for breakfast.

Now as adults, we know they’re not healthy. Yet, we are too indoctrinated through years of drip marketing, to ignore that fact and go for the comfort of a nice bowl of cereal.

the secret ingredient

But here’s the thing that stuck with me the most:
All of that… the language, the packaging, the design… none of it will work without one final ingredient.
Us.

You. Me.
Us, the consumers.

Because the whole thing relies on a decision we make, repeatedly, to not think too hard.
We walk through supermarket aisles half-aware, with 10 other things on our heads (probably due to branding and marketing as well)

We don’t want to picture what went into the chicken nugget or the sausage. it’s not because we don’t care about our health or our kids… but because caring takes effort.

The whole system depends on that.

This is industrial cruelty scaled for mass production.
And it continues, not because the industry hides it well… but because most people would rather not know. So marketing doesn’t need to lie. It just needs to make you comfortable enough to keep going.

Ignorance is bliss.