it possible that some Derren Brown-like activities have been at work to make people believe it is their choice when really they have been mentally hooked?
With that in mind, I think the addiction part is pretty clear. Fortunately, 99% of the hook is mental, created by years and years of clever marketing; the actual physical withdrawal (if you can even call it that) you will simply not notice. However, like most addictions, let’s not underestimate the power of the emotional hook because it is this which drives the fear.
FALSE EMOTION THAT APPEARS REAL
The fact is the GODS, through clever emotional advertising, emotional conditioning and mood-altering chemicals (yes, there is a physical part), have managed to create a powerful and emotionally driven food. As such, people become mentally and physically ‘attached’ and in many cases getting rid of chocolate proves as difficult as ending a relationship; they literally feel fear at letting go and so are ‘hooked’. Luckily, the emotions created by the marketing and the chemicals are all false, they just appear real. After all, what on earth can possibly happen to you if you do stop eating chocolate? Your heads are hardly going to explode and you are certainly not going to starve. So any fears you may have about getting rid of chocolate from your life are completely false. That said, when something appears real it then is real to that person.
The only way to kick the chocolate – and be happy about it – is fully to shatter those fears and see this stuff and its pushers for what they really are. With that in mind, let’s really start to unwrap the industry by taking a long hard look behind the advertising and conditioning before we unwrap the many layers of the product itself.
One of the most famous lines with the word Mars in the title has got to be that from a very insightful John Gray – Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus – but it’s still not a patch on the most successful one ever used. I don’t think there’s a single person, in the UK at least, who doesn’t know …
3 A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play
MARS SPONSORS MARATHON
Mars paid $2 million for the worldwide rights to the Rolling Stones song ‘Satisfaction’ to help promote the company’s leading product – Snickers. But that is small change compared with the $5 billion they forked out to be the official sponsor of the 1984 Olympics. They also are a major sponsor in the football World Cup and, seemingly, will not miss any opportunity to link their product to something exciting and, ironically, sporty. This point was hammered home to me when I saw a friend of mine running on a treadmill in my local gym dressed as a Mars Bar. It turned out that Mars was sponsoring him to run the London marathon, a point which would have been made a lot funnier if the chocolate bar Marathon wasn’t now called Snickers! It took him over 5 hours to complete the race with buckled knees in what amounted to a Mars boiler suit. He explained how all the way around the streets of London on one of the hottest marathon days in history, he heard rendition after rendition of ‘A Mars A Day Helps You Work, Rest And Play’ – how’s that for illustrating the power of advertising! I think Mars got their money’s worth – not only was their big bar in full view of the millions of spectators, but it was also featured on BBC TV, a broadcasting company which prides itself on the fact that they don’t advertise! And what sort of pay did he get for nearly knackering his knees for life and giving the GODS massive exposure? Forty-eight Mars Bars! Unlike my friend, Mars are in my opinion just pretending it’s all for charity, pretending it’s all for the greater good, but in truth it’s probably all bullshit. After all, the advertising opportunities at these sort of events must be the primary motivation for sponsoring them anyway. I’m not just picking on Mars here; most of the big chocolate companies are up to this sort of thing, especially the UK’s biggest brand of chocolate – Cadbury. In Spring 2003, ‘The Nations Favourite’ (their words not mine) launched a £9m campaign to persuade children to buy 160m of their chocolate bars in exchange for sports equipment for their schools – yes, SPORTS EQUIPMENT! They called the scheme – ’Cadbury Get Active’ and said their initiative would ‘help to tackle obesity’. They managed to do this through the Youth Sport Trust and it was endorsed by the Labour minister of sport Richard Caborn. Imagine if Benson & Hedges decided to encourage children to smoke in return for donating some money towards cancer research; would the health minister allow that as it will ‘help a good cause’? Cadbury even managed to get Paula Radcliffe to back the ‘Get Active’ marketing scheme. Paula is not just an athlete, but a super athlete. At the time of writing this book, she reigns supreme in the long-distance running world, almost breaking a new record every time she sets foot on a track. The link here is clear, eat this stuff and it will help you be a supreme athlete; it will give you energy; it will keep you going; it may even make you a star! Mind you, at least finding out that chocolate companies sponsor sports stars has exposed what Linford Christie might have had in his lunch box – two creme eggs and a king-size Mars bar!
Cadbury not only recruit lean athletic stars to link the image of sport and health with a product full of fat and sugar, but they also sponsor one of the most watched television shows in the UK – Coronation Street. Their aim here is to make sure that the relaxed, end-of-the-day, put-your-feet-up feeling gets associated with their product. Does it work? I should coco! The people who make the decisions to spend millions advertising and sponsoring sports events or TV shows aren’t stupid – they more than know what they are doing. They know that if they can link a positive emotion or ‘feel good’ factor to their product they’re onto a winner – and, boy oh boy, are they good at it?
‘The Sweetest Things On Earth Come From Mars’
(US Advertising slogan for Mars in the 1960s)
Every time you see a chocolate ad, hear a slogan, see a piece of chocolate cleverly placed in a film or catch a glimpse of a glossy wrapper out of the corner of your eye when at a theme park such as Disney World, you can be sure that months of planning and board meetings went into making it happen. Advertising and marketing are a science and the not-so-mad professors are paid massive amounts to come up with catchy slogans and think up ingenious ideas that will lure you in and get you emotionally hooked. Bill Suhring, ex-marketing man at Mars and creator of the slogan above, was paid a basic salary of $35,000 a year (back in 1968!) to head marketing at Mars’ arch-rivals Hershey. To put this in perspective, even the president of the chocolate giant Hershey didn’t make that sort of money back then. Marketing was, and is, taken very seriously and in the cut-throat Willy Wonka world of chocolate, anything goes.
SWEET FA – FALSE ADVERTISING
In the UK there is a body called the ‘Advertising Standards Authority’ (ASA), made up of individuals whose sole purpose is to make sure that the claims made in advertisements are true, accurate and not misleading in any way. With that in mind, doesn’t it make