Pi-Consulting

Several centuries after Marco Polo introduced pasta noodles from China to Italians, that inventive race went one better and invented pizza, which promptly swept onto the fast-food menus of a grateful world. Now the tide may be beginning to reverse, at least in the UK, where Pizza Hut (700 restaurants across the country) has decided to re-name itself Pasta Hut. This startling decision is an effort to charm anew those customers whose palates have perhaps become jaded by family-sized Pepperoni Specials, Quattro Stagiones and American Hots, or are concerned about healthy-eating issues. Under its new name, the company is set to spend around $170 million on improving its restaurants, opening more outlets and developing its menu. The restaurants will still sell pizzas, but the new pasta-linked name will show that a range of healthier meals are now on offer, featuring a variety of new pasta-based dishes. Says chief executive Alasdair Murdoch: “We’re doing it to try to attract customers who probably haven’t been in for a few years”. It remains to be seen if the spirit of Marco Polo will exert the same influence over other pizza-eating countries like the USA. Source: London Financial Times, WARC News, Pi

Tattoos are forever. That’s the point, isn’t it? A permanent emotional commitment to that dragon or death’s head on your bicep, that pouting cutie or crucifix splayed across your shoulders? Or having the name of The One indelibly and romantically tattooed on your wrist – like, forever? Ah, but what happens when he/she turns out NOT to be The One, after all? Better call Dr. Tattoff, a growing chain of tattoo parlors in reverse, where they erase your past ink mistakes with laser technology. Most of the clientele you’ll find there are young women aged 25-35, proving that it is indeed a lady’s prerogative to change her mind. Ironically, the growing realization that you can get rid of the things seems actually to be boosting the demand for tattoos among both sexes. The price tag can be an obstacle, at $39 per square inch per laser treatment, way more than you pay to have the image put there in the first place. And the experience is uncomfortable. Strangely, however, some of the demand for tattoo removal is so that people can clear the space and get inked all over again. Source: New York Times, Pi.

After decades of believing that “you can never be too rich or too thin”, women are at last challenging the second half of that precept. And marketers are supporting them in turning their backs on the waif-like physical ideal that fashion and the movie industry have demanded of the female form since the 1920s. Bosses at Anglo-Dutch consumer goods conglomerate Unilever have announced their corporate determination to celebrate a more generously-proportioned body shape. This year the firm issued an edict to its marketers that the only models to be used in advertising its products would be those with a healthy Body Mass Index, calculated as the proportion of body fat to other tissue. Unilever is already boosting the self-esteem of bigger girls with its “Real Beauty” campaign for Dove soap and personal care products, whose sales seem to have benefited from spontaneous uplift even when their models didn’t. Sources: WARC Bulletin, Pi.

The last wonder-drug to change socio-sexual behaviour in Spain this much was probably aspirin, that ready answer to “Not tonight, querido, I have a headache”. Now it’s the turn of the Viagra generation. Spain’s leading sexologist, Dr. Carlos San Martin, rather poetically calls it “an explosion”. On one widely-reported occasion, a man pulled a convincing-looking water-pistol (surely a symbolic choice of weapon?) in a Madrid pharmacy, and demanded their entire stock of the performance-enhancing blue pills. He was back two hours later to present the astonished lady-pharmacists with a large bouquet of roses. Which was when they arrested him. However, his enthusiasm for Viagra marks a widespread social phenomenon. Pfizer sold a million boxes last year, the equivalent of one pack for every 17 adult male Spaniards. Individual pills have changed hands at discos and parties for $80 apiece, often paired with tabs of Extacy. Women badger their boyfriends to get prescriptions, putting a new twist between the sexes on sexual liberation. Sociologists attribute the trend to Spain shrugging off the conservatism and sexual repression of the Franco era, with the afternoon siesta now giving ground to an energetic quest for ‘nookie’. However, there seem to be limits to the miracles Viagra can sustain. A lady IT professional in her mid-40s recently dumped her psychologist boyfriend, ten years her senior, for a 32-year-old unemployed athlete, despite the older man’s obedient commitment to swallowing frequent doses of Viagra. “Now I get sex six times a day”, said Carmen. “But I do miss going to the opera”. Source: The New York Times, Pi.

Fascinating facts can be gleaned from the world’s census data. Americans have annually been drinking over 23 gallons per capita of bottled water, (which isn’t fattening), in other words a statistically higher ‘share-of-bladder’ than their consumption of beer, (which is). This may partly explain why the obesity-gap between Americans and Australians, Britons, Greeks, New Zealanders and Mexicans is closing. Maybe those nations, too, are aiming at the 64 days a year that Americans spend sitting watching TV. But wait! When US citizens do get up off the couch, it turns out to be a dangerous world out there. Bicycles are the US consumer product most likely to be involved in accidents, but lawnmowers and …beds (!!) follow close behind. Risky thing, leisure time…. Source: Census data, The New York Times, Pi.