Yeah, nobody thinks they’re influenced by advertising. And I’m sure that nobody looks at two different packages of pretzels and says “I’m going to buy the one that had the nice story on it”. But they might well say “When I bought that brand before, they tasted very good”, and they might have tasted very good, in part, because they were in a good mood at the time they were eating them, and they might have been in a good mood, in part, because they were positively influenced by the story on the bag.
And as I said, the cost of putting the story on is almost nil. It might take some low-level ad-agency flunky a half-hour to come up with the text, and that only if they have to Google the history of the company. It’d only take maybe a hundred extra bags sold for that to be worth it.
Consumers are buying the story as much as the product. I don’t know Snyder’s pretzel’s but I could be buying into their ‘noble’ legacy’, which maybe speaks of their being established X years ago, with all the overtones of a trusty, reliable brand, maybe something from your parents’ experience as well. If they are that old, they can’t be using nasty modern chemicals, unless they absolutely had too. Why, I bet they still use the same recipe they did 100 years ago and each Snyder gets to spend time in their little bakery making the pretzels. For that [actual fact absent] reason alone they are preferable to Brand X, and worth paying the extra.
Similarly, I might not care about where my food comes from and be probably quite naive about it, but I avoid one possible bit of existential angst by being reassured by the packaging that the cows gave their milk happily, consensually and the farmer warmed their hands first. Oh and just by saying ‘Lucerne’ it makes you think of green Swiss meadows, crisp mountain air, neutrality from the conflicts ravaging the rest of Europe and cows probably doing quite well, what with all the Nazi gold awash in the economy. I find it easy to disassociate this product from the gigantic dairy processing complex we drove past last summer.
Just for the record (as I work on this kind of thing): the information that’d be used to write that story would likely have been provided directly to the ad agency by the clients; in most cases, the copywriter would not need to do any of their own research.
All told, between a strategist including that information in the creative brief, one or more copywriters developing a few variations of the text, a proofreader reviewing it, getting client approval, etc., it’s more than a half-hour of total work, but not a massive amount of work, and in the grand scheme of things, a fairly inexpensive project.
Dungeon delving is hungry work, so when my stalwart group of adventurers and I need some belly timber we reach for Utz brand pretzels. They’re tastier than iron rations, don’t add much to your encumberance level, and hirlings love 'em (assuming your hirlings are still alive at the end of the day).
Other than the Nazi part, that’s likely the image that they’re trying to evoke with the name. FWIW, as far as I’m able to tell, they’re a California-based company, which specializes in providing private-label / store-brand dairy products (under the Lucerne name, and others) for Safeway-owned supermarkets, among others.
IIRC, the OP lives in the Chicago area; I know that Jewel (one of our local grocery chains) carries Lucerne products, and they’re owned by Albertsons (which also owns Safeway).
And yet here you are, advertising on behalf of Snyder’s, with you having paid them for the privilege. It sounds like the marketing strategy worked exactly as intended.
But not enough to go out and buy them yourself when the food procurement officer brought home Snyder’s. Did you ask if the FPO happened to read the label in the store?
Everyone just robotically assumes that every last thing a vendor does with their product is driven by extensively researched and highly scientific marketing strategy. It could just be that some person in the company with sway (like the president or founder) really likes the story, and–as Chronos notes–the cost is nothing, so they put it there just to make them happy.
People love to buy stuff from small companies. They don’t want to know that most of the stuff on the shelves at their local super comes from just a handful of companies. Those BBQ sauces with a face and name on the label? Almost certainly made by one of the Big 3.
In the case of Snyder’s, they are part of the Campbell’s conglomerate. Not one of the biggest. In fact, the largest shareholder is the heiress of the original Campbell. But still a good sized outfit.
Never underestimate how being susceptible to warm, fuzzy feelings leads to things somehow tasting better and more resales.
I confess to at least cursory reading of material on the side of egg cartons at the supermarket. It’s a feel-good thing to know that the chickens that laid those eggs roam free, gently clucking, in a meadow full of wildflowers, eating only the finest organic veggie feed and never even having the words “hormone” or “antibiotic” spoken within their presence.
This is impossible. When the egg carton tells you that their chickens are fed a 100% vegetarian diet, they’re telling you that those chickens have never seen life outside of a cage. There are chickens out there who do roam free, gently clucking, in a meadow full of wildflowers, if you know where to look and are willing to pay a premium for their eggs. But any such chickens will have a lot of bugs, small rodents, and other non-vegetarian feed in their diet.
What’s meant by “vegetarian feed” is feed free of animal by-products, which can include goodies like blood, same-species meat, feathers and even things like rendered road kill.
I think most people understand that free-roaming chickens eat bugs and such.