Marketing: What’s in a word?
By Kris | February 19th, 2007 No Comments »
So my family has been battling the flu for the last couple of days and it appears that it will last into this week. Today, with the holiday, I took my son, who was feeling better, out to run errands and just get out of the house. Well, we stopped at Carls Jr. and got some lunch, my son got the kid’s meal and I got a burger.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the fast food restaurants have done some fiddling with the sizes of meals. Carls Jr. got me to buy a larger meal when I really didn’t need it, all because of the words they used to define the sizes.
Let me explain. Some food joints will have actual samples of the drink sizes so you can see what you’re getting, Carls Jr. didn’t have this. They also didn’t list their “regular” size, leaving me to choose between “medium” and “large”(I think it was large). so naturally, without asking what the regular size was and assuming that I didn’t want a “small” size, which typically comes before “medium,” I told the lady I wanted a “medium” -sized meal. What I actually got I would define at least as a “large” meal.
This reminds me of a company that advertised using “fresh steam” to clean their bottles before filling them with a drink. What is “fresh steam”? I couldn’t tell you, steam is usually fresh–granted I’m not a scientist.
My Two Cents: If you’re a marketer, it will benefit you to understand the psychology of words; if you’re a consumer, caveat emptor!
Photo Courtesy of ramecker
