Who Is Their Intended Demographic?

 

Have you ever seen an advertisement for a product that left you wondering who on earth the company had in mind as its prospective market base?

At some point over the last year, I think, perhaps, as far back as last Christmas, I was amused to see a television commercial that raised this very question. It was for Maple Leaf Foods, and was promoting a product line labelled 50/50. The products so labelled are hamburgers and sausages that are half meat, and half a plant-based substitute. 

This is not intended as a commentary on the products themselves. I have not tried them and, for all I know, they could be the best tasting, greatest and most nutritious items on the market today. 

I could not watch that commercial, however, without trying to picture what the brainstorming session that gave birth to these might have looked like. I imagined a meeting of marketing executives, fresh out of college and with no experience of real life and real people. They were sitting around a table and one of them made the following pitch: 

“As you all know, a number of products have appeared in recent years, that resemble meat products but which are derived entirely from plants. There are people out there, who are known as vegetarians and vegans, who buy and eat these products. There are other people, who are proud and loud meat-eaters, who buy regular beef hamburgers and pork sausages. Now here is my proposal. Let’s develop a product that we can sell to both groups at the same time and capture both markets.” 

At the risk of ruining a good joke by explaining it, the reason the above imagined scenario is so hilarious is that a half-and-half meat and vegetable product, rather than appeal to both vegetarians/vegans and proud carnivores simultaneously, would appeal to neither and probably be offensive to both. 

Vegetarians, for varying reasons – a health condition that requires it, the mistaken notion that it is healthier in general, or some sort of perverse moral hang-up against the eating of animal flesh – do not eat meat. A burger or sausage that is half meat would be as much against their diet as one that is fully meat. Needless to say this goes double for the vegans, those vegetarians with extra large carrots stuck up their butts who think they are morally superior, not only to normal people, but to other vegetarians, because they won’t even eat dairy products or eggs. 

As for the proud carnivores – the kind of people who like their meat, who make sure that you know they like their meat, and who generally hold the people discussed in the preceding paragraph in contempt – can you really see them embracing a meat product that is half plant-substitute? They wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole. 

There are, of course, plenty of people – the majority, I am sure – who base their food choices on personal taste, rather than some food ideology. While such people would not have the kind of natural aversion to a meat product that is half plant-based substitute that the previous groups would have, it is difficult to see why they would be particularly attracted to these products either. People who like both meat and vegetables, tend to prefer meat as meat, and vegetables as vegetables, or some combination of both that is its own thing, over vegetables disguised to look like meat or meat diluted by vegetables. 

Of course, the fact that these products continue to be available indicates that somebody is buying them and in large enough quantities to make them profitable to produce and sell. That is all that really matters as far as the company is concerned, but the question of who exactly that somebody is remains a very interesting one. 

This was not the first time the question of who they expect to buy this has popped into my head during a commercial. Usually, however, it is has something to do with the product being extremely redundant or a poorly conceived sales pitch that seems more likely to have the opposite of its intended effect. This one stood out because it had the appearance of having been thought up in an amusing scenario like the one imagined above. Since we all need a good laugh after the bad joke which was Captain Airhead’s proposals in the Throne Speech earlier this week for burdening us all with more socialism, censorship, rules, and government debt, I figured I would share that with you rather than dissecting said proposals.