Marketing strategies for consumers who think culture is something you only find in yogurt
A beer or soda in a long-necked, brown bottle makes a man feel like a man. Drinking through a straw does not
MY favourite new word is “manfluencer”. It goes without saying that it was created in the US and has popped up in consumer magazines that scrutinise shopping trends.
Doing the shopping is no longer solely a woman’s job. Midan Marketing, a US company, recently released a study that showed striking changes in the ways men do their shopping. And an article in the Wall Street Journal observed, “The traditional ‘she’ has to make room for the up-and-coming, influential ‘he’.”
The study showed that men have become more informed about their shopping choices and “manfluencers” are now responsible for at least half of the grocery shopping and meal preparation in their households.
The question is whether men who shop judge the packaging rather than the contents of the product.
Lu Ann Williams, head of research for Netherlands-based Innova Market Insights, said a survey of 900 meateating men, aged from 18 to 64, revealed 47% to be “manfluencers”.
She said: “A beer or soda in a longnecked, brown bottle makes a man feel like a man. Drinking through a straw does not. It makes for puckered lips and sunken cheeks and that is not a good ‘guy look’.”
Which helps explain Powerful Yogurt, a Greek-style yogurt recently launched in the US which features a bull’s head symbol on red-and-black packaging. The container is contoured to look like a well-muscled six-pack, echoing the manufacturer’s slogan “Find Your Inner Abs”.
Nothing was added to the actual yogurt, but the marketers went to work with the intention of making a container that is all about “male attitude” — a bit of dash and style to deliver the message to the male customer.
The result is a yogurt container featuring an unapologetically dudecentric design with a big man-sized helping. Compared with the pale yellows, greens, pinks or classic white of traditional yoghurt containers, the red-and-black design is a bold new look.
You know the product must be a success when comedian Stephen Colbert shows it on The Colbert Report and says: “Yes, bull horns. This yogurt is extra manly because evidently it’s made from bull milk. Very difficult to acquire. But the bull will thank you.”
I hope “Powerful Yogurt” will come to South Africa, but I wonder if the “manfluencers” will filter through the supermarket chains into our shopping malls.
Although I eat yogurt — as do my dogs — I realised I did not really know much about it. To my surprise, I discovered it is one of the oldest foods in culinary history. It is referred to in ancient Indian manuscripts, where the combination of yogurt and honey was called “the food of the gods”. The ancient Roman sage Pliny the Elder mentioned yogurt, remarking nearly 2 000 years ago that certain “barbarous nations” knew how to “thicken the milk into a substance with an agreeable acidity”.
In the 11th century, the Turks enhanced yogurt with mustard seeds and cinnamon and kept it in goat-skin bags where it fermented.
Francis I, the king of France in 1515, suffered from diarrhoea which no French doctor could cure. His Turkish ally, Suleiman the Magnificent, sent his doctor, who supposedly cured Francis with yogurt.
Yogurt is, however, a spring chicken compared with chocolate which was discovered by the Aztecs about 4 000 years ago. Christopher Columbus was the first “manfluencer” to bring cocoa beans back to Europe in around 1500, but that is a story for another day.