Just a mini-rant for today, but one which I think we can all get behind.
I had a rather disappointing dinner last night, partly because I was using own-brand sweetcorn rather then Green Giant (ho, ho, ho!), but more because the pasta stir-in sauce I used (classy, I know) said
‘new improved recipe!’
on it.
I can’t be alone, can I, in feeling a sense of fear and dread when I read that on the label of a favourite food product? It does, by and large, mean ‘new not-quite-as-good recipe’, doesn’t it?
The problem with that message as a concept is that the people you’re telling it to, your existing customers, presumably liked the previous recipe just fine. That’s why they buy it! Does anyone load a jar of sauce into their trolley saying ‘well, I’ll buy it for now, but until they change the recipe it tastes pretty shit to me’? No, people buy a product becasue they’ve maybe tried a few different varieties and settled on that one, or just tried that particular one once and liked it.
This is one of those times when marketing people have been asked to make some bad news more palatable to consumers and they decide that the best way is to treat us like fucking idiots and pretend that it’s actually a good thing, and that they’re doing it in order to serve you better. NO! What’s happened is the maker of my favourite brand of stir-in sauce (which might rhyme with fuck-me-oh) wanted to cut costs by using cheaper ingredients but their taste testers said it tasted worse. Oh well, just polish the turd and say it’s a ‘new improved recipe’.