food

What do cameras and sandwiches have in common? A lot, Jonathan Kaplan hopes. The creator of Flip Video, the super-simple camcorder device that provided a lot of the initial fuel behind YouTube’s early growth, has gotten a lot of press lately about his latest aspiration: The Melt, a nationwide chain of restaurants offering gourmet variations of grilled cheese sandwiches.

Most of us don’t give much thought to what we call our product, at least in terms of category. Toothpaste is toothpaste. Cars are cars. Perhaps it’s time that other businesses learn what many restaurants already know: what you call a product affects its appeal and sales. In particular, unhealthy dishes that consumers might avoid can be made more appealing.

The Creating Results blog is always worth a read.

If you are interested in the food industry then have a read of blog1 and blog2.

The new laws popping up which require restaurants to post calorie counts next to food listings have me concerned. This may come as a surprise to those who know me – after all, I am a fitness enthusiast and I try to practice healthy eating. So the nutritional content of food is really important to me.

I few years back, I made a new year's resolution to lose some weight, something that's way overdue. After years of eating whole cakes or bags of cookies and washing it down with a half gallon of milk, the calories caught up with me. I thought I could keep avoiding them for a couple of more years, but I couldn't hide any longer. So, I went to Dr. Rodriguez, a nutritionist that my wife & mother-in-law have used in the past with great results.

"Good taste" is rarely used to describe great advertising, but Domino's is going to town with it.

It just announced that it has doubled its quarterly profits after telling its customers that it had fixed the taste of its pizzas. It didn't "improve" things or follow any other standard operating procedures of the marketing world; in fact, it violated some of the basic tenets of advertising, such as telling the truth.

I’ve been chronicling the nascent neuromarketing industry since 2006, and I don’t think I’ve seen a story to date which captured social media attention to the degree that the recent Campbell Soup neuromarketing story did. The original story in the Wall Street Journal fueled a mini-boom of Twitter and blogging activity. Why? I think the fact that a major consumer products company went on the record about their use of neuromarketing, and even provided specifics of how they changed their marketing, was the driving force. This was an unusually detailed look inside a practical application of neuromarketing.