The Next Big Thing by Richard Faulk

Author:Richard Faulk
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zest
Published: 2015-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

WHAT’S IN A NAME?

Experts agree it was brilliant marketing that made Swanson’s frozen meals a success. After all, the technology was old, the product already familiar, and Swanson’s tasted no better than the competition.

The first smart move was to reverse the One-Eyed Eskimo strategy and avoid referencing freezing in the name — because, to consumers, that was just a liability. Instead, Swanson went high-tech, as Maxson had done with the Strato-Plates, but brought it closer to home: Behold the TV dinner!

In the early 1950s, televisions were the hottest consumer technology. In just eight years, TV ownership had gone from less than 1 percent to 50 percent of all households — a faster proliferation than either the telephone or indoor plumbing had enjoyed. By calling its frozen meal the TV dinner, Swanson hitched its product to a cultural phenomenon. It would be like launching an iDinner in 2007.

Swanson used all its weight to ensure its new product would break through, launching a national advertising campaign it called “Operation Smash.” Even the packaging was a bold and dizzyingly meta-statement, depicting in glorious six-color printing a wood-grained console TV set with the meal itself, heated and ready for eating, on the screen. A USDA inspection stamp in one corner and price label in the other were disguised as tuner and volume dials, while the ingredients list was boxed at the bottom like a TV speaker.

The TV theme was more than a gimmick — it was a mission statement. Wordlessly but effectively, it redefined the purpose of frozen meals. Sure, they were convenient, but their goal wasn’t to enable the sheer laziness: It was to bring families together — around the miracle of television.

The TV dinner debuted in 1954, and Swanson quickly cornered the frozen dinner market, selling some 13 million meals each year. Swanson dropped the name “TV dinner” in 1962, but the name stuck with consumers. Just as “facial tissue” was “Kleenex” and “photocopies” would be “Xeroxes,” for years to come any “frozen meal” was a “TV dinner.”

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.