When a Product Becomes Irrelevant

Everyone has seen those commercials where a group of hipsters demonstrate how incredibly free, exuberant and insanely hip their lives are. They're either playing Frisbee golf while wearing trendy sweaters and scarves or riding ultra-cool scooters while racing through traffic-free downtown streets, also wearing trendy sweaters and scarves. At the end you discover that the commercial was for a product that never even appeared prominently in the ad. Something like underwear or cola or hair care products. You are left scratching your head saying, "What was THAT all about?"

Of course corporations no longer sell products. They sell images and lifestyles. They tell you virtually nothing about the product itself and more about the type of life you will have if you buy it. Many times they tell you as little about the product they are selling as possible.

Could this be because they have nothing else to offer? Like a guy who drives a Hummer, perhaps they are trying to compensate for what they don't have. After all, they are probably thinking, it's just shampoo. With hundreds of options on shampoo, or virtually every product, most producing fairly similar results, why would someone choose one over the other?

Take light beer. Anyone who tells you that they have a preference over Bud Light, Miller Lite or Coors Light is kidding themselves. They all taste remarkably similar. The only way to separate themselves is by advertising and brand loyalty/recognition.

Even when Coors says that its beer tastes better because it "brewed cold and shipped cold" it has everything to do with its Rocky Mountain refreshment image and nothing to do with actual taste.

Or say you set 10 pairs of jeans out in front of someone – all similar in price and quality. What could make someone choose one over the other? Perhaps the image and branding the corporation has spent so much on to create. Toss in some brand familiarity and perhaps some trendy swing dancers in a commercial and suddenly one pair of jeans seems more desirable than the next.

The same could be said for virtually every product. Take away the global onslaught of ads, the theme stores and the athlete endorsements (actually athletes don't really endorse products as much as they appear in non-speaking roles, usually sweating profusely, extremely hungry or running up the stairs of an empty stadium) and Nike becomes any old company selling overpriced shoes made in overseas sweatshops.

But a Swoosh magically increases the value of footwear by 200 percent. After all, the Nike Swoosh tells you everything about what kind of athlete you can be or what kind of active, bold and aggressive lifestyle you can achieve. But nothing about shoes.

Flavor of the month: Turkey

Today's discussion centers on turkey. But I'm not talking about Thanksgiving or anything that involves real, actual turkey.

I'm talking about the kind of turkey that you put on a sandwich, turkey that can be folded twice without coming apart, that slimy, ovalish, stretchable conglomerate appropriately placed next to the hot dogs at the grocery store.

Just because the package says "Turkey" does that make it turkey?

It reminds me of those disgusting strawberry candies. The thing I remember about them is that they taste nothing like a strawberry despite them trying to somehow fool you with the cellophane made to look like a strawberry. Like strawberry Jolly Ranchers, what they actually taste like is a distinct synthetic candy flavor labeled Strawberry.

Same goes for grape gum. When someone pops in a piece of grape Bubble Yum, they're after that artificial taste we now associated with grapes. Instead of calling the flavor Grape, they should have made up an entirely made-up name, as it is an entirely made-up flavor. Something like Grandoliciousness.

Of course they have to call it Grape in order to better associate it with food, hiding the fact that you are actually chewing on artificially flavored edible rubber that allegedly tastes like fruit.

Which gets back to turkey. Do turkey cold cuts taste anything like real, actual turkey?

No. They taste like . . . turkey cold cuts, a unique flavor that we have associated with a bird initially made famous by Pilgrims. Real turkey is eaten once, maybe twice a year, not everyday between slices of white bread.

I've never thought much about comparing real turkey to turkey cold cuts. But if you compare the taste of a Thanksgiving turkey and compare it to your typical turkey lunch meat, the two taste nothing alike.

The distinction became more clear when I noticed a new product at the grocery store. In the midst of the bright yellow and blue cardboard and plastic packaging of various flavors of artificially-shaped ham and baloney, a rectangular cardboard box – left predominantly in its natural cardboard color – caught my eye. Naturally, the product is called Natural Choice Oven Roasted Deli Turkey by Hormel.

Beside the name on the front is the word NEW printed on a leaf as well as the words ALL NATURAL INGREDIENTS** and NO PRESERVATIVES.

On the back are bullet points, differentiating further how the product is better than your run-of-the-mill cold cut. They are:

• No Nitrate or Nitrite added
• Minimally Processed
• No Artificial Ingredients
• Gluten Free
• No MSG Added

Is this what it has come to? Has No Nitrite really become a selling point for food? How did we get to the point where all the sandwich meat is packed with Gluten, MSG and Artificial Ingredients . . . except for one? Makes you wonder what else is in all that other turkey.

And why must I now pay more for lunch meat that is Minimally Processed instead of Overly Processed?

Surprisingly, Hormel's Natural Choice actually tastes like real turkey. And instead of the rubbery ovals of "turkey" you find elsewhere, this turkey flakes and tears like you would expect turkey to do.

But the fact that I am amazed because there's a package proclaiming Turkey that contains actual turkey is somewhat of an eye-opener.

Why Thanksgiving is better than you think

Halloween didn't go quietly this year. Judging by the number of Trick-Or-Treaters we've had living in three states in the past five years – about 18 total – I was under the impression that the spooky pagan holiday was on the verge of collapse.

Those feelings changed after a horrifying 106 youngsters rung our doorbell demanding candy this year. Perhaps Connecticut's rich history of heretics, witches and headless horseman gives Halloween higher holiday status than in, say, New Mexico.

With Halloween out of the way and no candy left over to make it all worth it, we now look forward to Thanksgiving, which is by far the best holiday we have to choose from in America.

It goes without saying that the most glorious aspect of Thanksgiving is that it is centered on binge eating. It's the one day where stuffing your giant face is completely and utterly socially acceptable and encouraged, if not downright required or coerced.

But for me what makes Thanksgiving so great – after the eating of course – is that it has somehow survived a commercial takeover.

I mean, when Easter gets to the point where it engulfs four aisles at Target, you know the corporate hijacking of holidays has become quite grave.

Most holidays – Valentine's Day, birthdays, Mother's Day, Father's Day – are all centered on what you will buy for whom. Beyond getting the day off, the only remarkable thing about Labor Day and Memorial Day are the sales advertised at stores like J.C. Penney. And how serious is the problem when our national economy convulses this way or that way depending on how much people muster to plunk down on others at Christmas? With money they don't have, no less.

But back to Thanksgiving. The only spending you're doing for Thanksgiving is at the grocery store. And face it, you were going anyway. You're just picking up a few extra items . . . like a bird that weighs as much as my dog.

In addition to subduing corporate America, Thanksgiving has apparently avoided something else that has attached itself to holidays: Music. If there's one thing that we like about holidays, other than spending money like it's not ours (it's not), it is holiday music.

We stage entire school Christmas performances just so we can showcase our beloved carols through the mouths of innocent children. Fourth of July is rife with patriotic propaganda. Easter has a host of crucifiction/ resurection hymns. New Years has its song whose title I still am unsure how to pronounce.

But Thanksgiving has been left alone. And Dido's "Thank You" or Andrew Gold's "Thank You For Being a Friend" don't count, contrary to one web site which ranks alleged "Thanksgiving Songs". (A couple Thanksgiving songs I'd like to see: "Amaizing Thanks," "Gord of Gords" and "O Cornucopia, We Thank Thee")

The only popular song I could find that mentions Thanksgiving specifically was Adam Sandler's "The Thanksgiving Song." (Imagine if there were just one popular Christmas song and that one song was called "The Christmas Tune and it was written and performed by Jack Black.)

Instead for Christmas you've got Silent Night packaged a hundred different ways. And then you've got to buy and send Christmas cards and then you have to buy all your presents, which forces everyone to the store at once because everyone put it off as long as possible which causes snarling holiday traffic, which makes everyone tired, cranky and moody. By the time the day rolls around, everyone is grumpy, in debt and depressed, then forced into contact with extended family. It's no wonder an innocent group of carolers can send someone right over the edge.

Thanksgiving, conversely, is a holiday with no fluff and no fat. No gifts, no songs, no candy and no symbolic explosions choreographed to music. Just right.