So I recently was in a supermarket when I spotted this:
Now I appreciate that size of packet doesn’t always reflect the volume of its contents and I also accept that in this globalised World, identical products in a store may actually originate from different countries, but people – especially when they’re in the retail environment – don’t think or care about this sort of thing and all this behaviour does is alienate people from your brands.
OK, so the chances of this appearing in the same store are potentially quite low, but still, it’s hardly great brand management.
Maybe they would have been better simply saying, ‘New Size’ … so it implies it’s bigger, but legally, they can claim it was smaller.
Yes, I know that’s a shady, bullshit way to do it and I’m not really advocating it – especially as they’d cop even more shit if people found out – but pointing this out gives me the chance to quote one of my favourite football stories.
Many years ago, there was a football manager called Tommy Docherty.
He had a fairly good reputation and joined Rotherham United, who were residing in division 2. [This was when division 2 was really division 2 … not division 3 as it is in today’s mad marketed football league]
Sadly the team didn’t perform very well that year and by got relegated, which led to this wonderful quote by Docherty when interviewed by the media:
“I promised the Chairman I’d get us out of Division 2 & I did.”
Ambigious truth genius.