Hello, my name is Joanna and I am a sucker for marketing ploys. As difficult as it is to do, they say the first step is admitting that you have a problem. So there you go. Yesterday morning while watching the news, I saw a commercial for Tostitos or some kind of chippy/dippy advertisement and I turned to Lee and exclaimed (with quite a lot of enthusiasm) that we needed to get some quote: “Super Bowl snacks!”
We weren’t throwing or attending any parties, but just like the pressure I feel to make (or rather, eat) cut-out cookies at Christmas and pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving and slam dozens of bite-size snickers at Halloween — I felt the overwhelming urge to go out and purchase tortilla chips and guacamole exactly like I’d just seen on the television. See, I told you… total sucker.
And I should see this stuff coming… I should be like teflon when it comes to marketing trickery… I AM IN MARKETING. I UNDERSTAND the game. I PLAY the game. I manipulate people all the time… just like the Tostitos people were presently manipulating me. And yet I still fall prey to the sneaky schemes of retail giants and manufacturers everywhere.
After I got done throwing my super fit and quieted down, Lee looked at me and said: “OK, let’s go to the store and get some snacks… But do they have to be ‘Super Bowl’ snacks? Like, ‘Super Bowl-Approved‘ snacks as opposed to just plain old regular snacks?”
I shot him a look of both disgust and amusement at his overt sarcasm. Disgusted at his mockery but amused by how right he actually was. After all, I didn’t want just any snack. I wanted the stuff that the folks at Frito-Lay (makers of Tostitos) and Pepsi and Budweiser and Kraft and Keebler WANTED me to want! I wanted Super Bowl-Approved snacks! It had worked. They had gotten into my head. They successfully bore a hole in my brain and pulled my strings. Those evil, capitalist, genius bastards.
And you know what? When we arrived at the superstore for our supersnacks—passing through the glass doors that magically parted upon our arrival and swallowed us up as they whooshed loudly, closing behind us—we were indeed greeted by a larger-than-life display of what else but towers of two-liters and avocados and Tostitos chips of every shape, size, color, flavor and variety there ever was.
There would be no plain old regular snacks for this gal. I was going all-out. No matter what the remainder of my Sunday looked like, one thing was for sure… as far as the marketing machines at Frito-Lay and Pepsi and Budweiser and Kraft and Keebler were concerned… my diet was going to be Super Bowl-Approved.
Woman In Thrisis 
Joanna, congratulations, they say the first step in recovery is recognizing you have a problem! 😀 We the masses are the targets of the advertising gestapo, and we are the targets because… well, it works we bite hook, line and sinker. Because we want to belong, we want to be part of the in, hip, cool, thing to do, better than the Jones’, must have it now crowd. The alternative has been promoted as well, you know the outcasts, fanatical, go against the grain, think for yourself crowd is satirized as to awful to even think about! Imagine, me… a person to be avoided at all costs because I was not sporting a Patriot’s Jersey with a bag of Doritos in my hand, I had to pull the shades turn off the lights and hope the masses didn’t show up to lynch me for my social ineptness 🙂
Of course I did have some fabulous guacamole dip with my “Tostitos” … not that there’s anything wrong with that! 😉
haha 🙂 Love the Seinfeld reference at the end there. I know what you mean. I was thinking about the hook, line and sinker part myself. They’re good. They study us… our movements, our patterns and then they deliver their messages to us in a multi-tiered fashion and it works (almost) every, single time!
Just bought a “cool” accent chair for our soon to be remodeled living room and signed up for Pier 1 e-mails. (You will seee where this is going in just a few…) Well, anyway, I got the first e-mail which said I must add their e-mail address to my contact list because…are you ready for this? “It is what all the incrowd is doing!”
So glad you got the Super Bowl approved snacks. Otherwise, you would have jinked the game and neither side would have won.
Yay! So glad you got the chair! Sometimes one piece is all you need to spark the work in getting the rest of the room ready 🙂
But that “in crowd” crap is ridiculous! I wouldn’t buy from them on principle just because of that. Well, unless it was something REALLY cool that I couldn’t resist and HAD to have 😉
Too funny – love it!!!
Why don’t we think of it as a tradition instead of other things. It’s just what we do at a given time. How we make memories. Mark time.
I don’t even watch football neither does my husband. But just think if we didn’t have all of these events life in general might be a little more boring. So don’t worry it’s ok.