Tim Tse's Blog

I was just browsing the internet for materials for week 2’s marketing blog assignment until I saw this piece of news.

DiGiorno’s Pizza And Cookies Combo Is Watershed Moment In American Obesity

DiGiorno, one of the largest frozen pizza brands in the United States, is launching a new product that boxes two of American’s most favorite foods, pizza and cookies, together. DiGiorno is a product under the well-known brand Nestlé. DiGiorno is marketed under the name of “Delissio” in Canada.

Normally pizzas go with appetizers such as chicken wings or cheese-y bread sticks (and DiGiorno has already packaged pizza and wings before in the past, according to the left picture below).

Source: www.delish.com

But this time, DiGiorno chose to pair up pizza with chocolate chip cookies (to be exact, cookie dough that bakes 12 cookies), which none of the frozen pizza companies had done before. This undoubtedly broadens the target market to parents, since chocolate chip cookies is one of children’s favourite snack. Nestlé at the same time, can advertise their chocolate chip cookie dough and let consumers have a sample of what they taste like, thus increasing the chance of people actually purchasing them in the future.

Pairing up these two items seem like it’ll create a perfect meal for families. However, according to Nestlé’s webpage on their chocolate chip cookie dough,  1 serving of it already contains 130 calories and 12% of fat; also according to fatsecret.com, DiGiorno pizzas have an average of 350 calories per 1/5 pizza. Imagine if someone purchases the pizza/cookie combo and consumes the whole thing him/herself, that would automatically be 3310 calories!

This pizza/cookie combo does look mouth-watering to people. However, Nestlé isn’t doing a very great job on lowering the obesity rate in the United States.

So I’ve been watching TV lately and accidentally switched to a TV channel that was playing those “Paid Programming” shows (you know, those TV programs that sells product on TV). The product they were selling was a juice blender. What makes this juice blender different is that it’s said that it will squeeze more juice (according to them, it will squeeze up to 100% of the liquid in the fruit) and will dry out the pulp to maximize the amount of juice it can get.

The spokesperson on this TV ad is a retired gym trainer. The juice blender is also named after this person. The main purpose of hiring him to speak to the public and naming the juice blender after him is that, I believe, make the juice blender look more appealing to people who are health conscious. There’s also another lady in the ad who self proclaims that she’s an elementary school teacher. She takes the juice blender to an elementary school and blends juice for the children. By creating a story like this, the company is probably treating parents as their target market.

What I don’t understand about this TV ad is that initially the company sells the juice blender for $200. But 20 minutes later they change the price to only $100. What would really happen if someone calls the hotline and orders the blender? Would they be charged double if they called earlier?

(Update 1: I was just trying to Google a picture of a random juice blender since I forgot the name of the juice blender on the TV. But the first picture that I saw on Google was the exact same blender that I saw on TV. I guess search engine optimization is also a form of marketing then.)

(Image from Made-in-China.com)