What Can Cake Mix Teach Us About Marketing?

First and foremost, it's recognizable that many notable landmark examples in public relations are merely propaganda themselves. They're the metaphorical, The Boy Who Cried Wolf, of the genre. Examples, like the Chevrolet Nova that meant No Go when marketed in Mexico or the infamous eggs in a cake allegory. They persist even among professionals as examples of how to market to consumers but are factually flawed. None the less, there's something to learn from them.

In the case of the cake without eggs, the story goes like this. A company invents cake mix but find it's not selling very well. A salesman and psychologist, recognized for the first focus group (probably another lie), Ernest Dichter decides to poll women as to why they don't like baking with the cake mix which is arguably better tasting and easier to make. After all, you just pour the box into a bowl and add water, right?

But what Dichter (supposedly) found was that the recipe was too easy (everything including eggs was included in a dehydrated mix). Women didn't feel like it was their cake, there was no pride in their creativity. Perhaps it was a bit of resentment towards Betty Crocker that their husbands loved her cooking more than theirs? So the moral of the story was that the cake mix company decided to add eggs to the recipe allowing the women to feel like they were participating in the baking process and making a "recipe" rather than a mix. Why are so many instructions on pre-packaged foods providing alternative preparation methods? Perhaps it's because of the tale of the cake with no eggs?

Indeed, according to the magazine Bon Apetit, women generally state they've made their cake from scratch even if it comes from a box.

So what's the take-away? Give your audience options. Give them ownership in the process and make sure you understand how your product emotionally affects the psychological relationship of the environment it's going to be placed in. A tall order for sure, but if you want your cake and to eat it too then you have to crack an egg to find out what's on the inside.

Stranded by Uber's dysfunctional customer service

I was getting ready for my trip to India and my friend recommended that I download a couple apps for our trip, including Ola (a local Bangalore taxi company) and Uber. No worries, I thought. I was one step ahead of her having downloaded Uber for when in New York, as we were spending a few days there. I was quite excited to use the app considering the fact that there was a $20 credit sign-up bonus promotion going on. It seemed as though everything was falling into place as I was ready for our big adventure. I didn't bother with Lyft or the other competitors, knowing I had the Uber app on my phone and assuming since it's 2017, and a very popular option, it's going to work great. This as it turned out, would be a huge mistake that resulted in us taking the public bus at the airport.

What happened? Well, the first time I used the app, it immediately banned me. Thankfully, Bangalore has thousands of rickshaws that got me to and from our destinations. Had I downloaded Ola ahead …

Food Lion: Saying One Thing and Doing Another

Something strange is going on, something's wrong at my local grocer store, a Food Lion. The deli and bakery are missing. Rumors are flying around town as to what's happening. Did the snow storm crush the roof? Is it water damage or is there something more mysterious? As it happens, it's nothing more than continued renovations of the store... but no one told the customers.

In a world of communications where transparency is often the only thing holding your reputation together, not telling the customers anything seems like a little bit of deception. More importantly, why not tell the customers of your super cool improvements coming their way? Before the local townspeople crack completely at their inability to purchase their sliced bologna, I have to wonder if this is poor public relations or something more.

Food Lion is selling it to the media in larger markets (where curious journalists have reached out to the company's media relations) as:
The remodels are part of Foo…

Guerrilla Marketing in a Millennial World

Millennials are all about digital media. Companies are clamoring for their piece of the pie on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. However, sometimes what you need is a little bit of guerrilla marketing. Now, not every PR-pro has the grit or the intuition for this sort of thinking outside the box, but I believe those who do have a distinct advantage to their counterparts who only work in the digital or traditional medium.

Some of the best campaigns have been grassroots movements that utilize traffic patterns or public spaces to advertise their message. Some of the first of these clever campaigns simply used bed sheets hung at dawn on overpasses to catch the L.A. traffic rush that often sees hundreds of thousands of commuters.

A few years ago, I served as editor and chief on a local forum that used guerrilla marketing techniques to reach our audience. One of these techniques was borrowed from a hobby called Car Casting whereby you basically created a tiny pirate radio station. It involve…

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