Junk food carrots
How do you get people to eat more carrots? Keep telling them they are healthy or sell them like junk food?
A company in the US did just that. They packaged, promoted and sold carrots as the next thing to crunch instead of burgers or chips.
And people lapped it up. What does it mean? We tune out preachy pitches but respond to anything as long as it’s ‘fun’?
We’ve had it drilled into our heads that carrots and vegetables are healthy. And we yawned.
But package it as the next hot chip complete with the subliminal crinkly pack and the crunch that entertains?
Well, it appears that we are mindless about what we put into our mouths as long as we are told it tastes like forbidden food.
The market for baby carrots is already worth a billion dollars. And this guy wanted to take it to the next billion – when his team discovered a crucial statistic on examining advertising campaigns for agricultural commodities. like avocados, eggs, milk or almonds.
That it was effective every time. Paying back as much as twice to 10 times for the money spent. But when he asked agencies to pitch, every single one of them emphasised the healthy aspect of eating carrots in their communication until he got to Crispin Porter and Bogusky.
From the packaging to the advertising, they went for junk food style graphics – emphasising fun, not health. And the campaign worked
The moral of the story here gets a little muddy. Do you take something that is known for a certain quality and turn it on its head?
Does bank advertising have to be boring and straight laced just because banking is about prudence? Or is tinkering with that going to go badly?
A decade later, the packaging and the products are doing fine.
How many more product categories can this be applied to?
Bye bye buying
This may not be ideal.
But think of a world in which you rent everything. Your mobile phone. Your TV. You gaming console.
You don't send it to a landfill but extend the cycle of usage and the life of the product.
Apple is looking to introduce subscriptions for it's mobile phone models in future, so this is an idea with legs.
The company, Grover, is not asking you to be environmentally conscious. It's offering you a way to adopt that behavior and fulfil your needs as well. Practicing the principles of the circular economy.
Want to get a camera for a trip and then return it? Or keep it for a few months to complete a project? That works.
The strange thing is that people are perfectly happy to hire an older iPhone model instead of the latest one.
The company has recently raised $330 million in funding to buy new stock (That's ironic!), so it's a working business model.
And it probably works far better than asking people to be more conscious of their purchase cycles.
Want a different mobile phone model every three months? No problem. And since it goes back into the cycle of borrowing, there's a lot less guilt attached.
The company also aggregates the products, so it has a logistics business that receives, cleans and sends out products.
If the membership keeps growing, it could become a viable way for manufacturers to get back mobile phones in large numbers for mining expensive and rare elements.
Today, that's a costly exercise because the system is too fragmented for retrieval. This could be good middle ground for several product categories.
Perhaps we're seeing one of the building blocks of the circular economy taking shape.
How much does a Walmart trucker make?
During the first year, from $95000 - $110,0000.
And the experienced ones make a lot more.
The world has come full circle. Where the physically challenging job pays as much as the mentally exhausting ones.
Graduates from the top colleges entering investment banking jobs and the large tech companies command the same pay.
Walmart starts new drivers off after a four-month training program.
The shortages have been building up over the years and now, they've got acute.
Living on the road and going for long stretches without company is a tough call. Even for an earlier generation, it meant weeks, if not months away from home.
Indian companies like Rivigo have tried to solve the problem by making it some kind of a relay baton - where a driver has to be on the road for 8 hours, then rest and get another one back home.
But the route planning required is complex and hard to manage across multiple trucking companies. So the old routines persist.
Walmart has over 12000 trucks in its fleet - and the driving is sure to be physically daunting. Which is why it has a problem finding takers.
On the other hand, qualified graduates from top universities hit a career track which may be physically far less demanding. But the mental rigor to stay the course can lead to burnout.
This may be a sign of things to come - where jobs demanding physical rigor and discomfort will become hard to fill. And the people willing to do it can command high salaries.
The trucking pay rise is the canary of new dynamics in the career stakes.