About once a week I pick up a rotisserie chicken at the grocery store. It is the closest flavor match to the homegrown chicken my mother prepared years ago. I've never been a fan of today's refabricated chicken products - chicken patties, chicken fingers, chicken nuggets, chicken strips, popcorn chicken etc. Having grown up on a farm that raised chickens, I still am befuddled over how wildly popular processed chicken has continued to be both as a grocery item and as fast food. When these products were first introduced, I remember thinking that the lure of easy preparation would not be enough to keep these tasteless and rubbery chicken chunks on the market for long. Now I recognize that having lived on the coop end of the food chain left me lacking the imaginative insight that led brilliant advertisers to successfully market faux chicken over the past two decades.
I wonder about the conversations that occurred between advertising executives, sitting around a table, staring at the very first compressed chicken products. As a farm kid who participated in the annual chicken harvest, I can only imagine the contributions I would have made to the ad team. Together we would brainstorm names for the compact bites, such as chicken 'slivers', chicken 'bobbers', chicken 'bitties', chicken 'pucks'. By the time the ideas for names were narrowed down to chicken 'nuggets' and chicken 'fingers', I would be howling with laughter, spinning around in my office chair. Clearly, chickens do NOT have nuggets NOR do they have fingers. Do people not think about the reality of chicken 'fingers'? I can only see their long scrawny yellow clawed feet crusted with poultry poo. If folks had that picture in their mind they would never consider eating something called a 'chicken finger.'
Yessiree....If I'd been a member of that advertising team I would have confidently expressed my opinion that any food company compressing chicken into unrecognizable breaded blobs needed to be told it was an unmarketable product idea. It's a good thing that advertising is not my day job....
All one has to do today is pass a grocery freezer or fast food drive-thru to realize that my bold and short-sighted opinions about processed chicken would have been quickly fricasseed along with a career in advertising. My opinions and limited imagination would likely have been escorted down the office hallway to join the farm ad team working on cat food jingles. This might not have been all bad.....
Perhaps it could be the opportunity I have long waited for.
I would pitch my product development idea for what cats really crave.
Mouse and bird-flavored cat chow anyone? Perhaps with a catnip-infused coating...
Surely cats would go WILD for it !
You must admit, it wouldn't be the first bad idea that creative advertising turned to gold.
I agree, and I too would love to have an marketing/advertising job, only I want to be that person who thinks up names for paint colors.
ReplyDeleteI would love to see the names you would bestow on paint colors. Your ideas would make a TERRIFIC blog entry. I'll be waiting.... :)
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