Pi-Consulting

When the giant food corporation Nestlé, one of the biggest purveyors of sugar, fat and carbohydrates to a hungry world, paid $600 million for Australian diet-food company Jenny Craig, jaws sagged a little. Wasn’t this a bit like Dairy Queen buying a liposuction practice? Not so, said Nestlé, which already owns and markets the Lean Cuisine line; weight management, they’d have us know, will form a new and fast-growing part of its nutrition business. “The acquisition will also reinforce Nestlé’s presence in the USA, the world’s largest nutrition and weight-management market”. (Source: World Advertising Research Council, Pi)

Oh and Happy Halloween!!

# The Avon Lady, sure. Whaddya mean, Avon MAN? Anyone surprised by the concept will be even more amazed to learn that America already has around 12,000 Avon Men. They’re in no danger of outnumbering their female counterparts, since women still represent 98% of Avon’s sales force. But some of the guys are moving to the front in performance terms. Salvatore d’Amico of Philadelphia specializes selling eye-cream to the guys in the locker-room. His fail-safe selling line, “You look terrible!”, helped him achieve $40,000 in sales last year, and won him a cruise with a group of fellow-winners who were almost exclusively female. (They all left their husbands at home). A fellow sales-male asked him why he’d want to go on a cruise with 800 women. History does not record his reply. One of his fellow-passengers, a female lady, did however offer the comment “You should push Avon’s foot cream. Men have nasty feet”. (Source: New York Times)

Green attitudes represent a special problem for the parents of young babies. All those disposable diapers! They take years to biodegrade, yet a depressing, evil-smelling bulk of them just gets taken out with the trash, and ends up in landfill sites. Enter the gDiaper, which comes in cheerful bright colors, keeps baby snug and dry, and… saves the planet! Not that that last bit is the overt selling point for this new eco-friendly product, it’s more kind of understood. gDiaper’s marketing team want their brain-child to be seen as “The Toyota Prius of diapers”. As recently pointed out in Environment magazine, “Many eco-friendly products fail precisely because companies… put too much emphasis on the planet-saving thing. To reach the mainstream, (talk) attributes that any product needs: cost-effectiveness, convenience, status”. Seems green-minded attitudes are now so widespread, they no longer represent a marketing platform. Ho hum, so you got a green product. What else you got? (Source: New York Times, Pi)