Advertising is about creating images, and this is especially true when
advertising food and drink. What the food looks like is more important
than what it tastes like.
To sell food successfully, it must look appetizing. Milk must look
cold, bread must look freshly-baked, fruit must look juicy. Television
advertising of food often uses movement. Obviously, food looks
especially tasty when it moves. Chocolate sauce looks more delicious
when you see it being poured over ice cream than if it is in a bowl.
Sound effects - but not background music - also help to sell food:
sausages frying in a pan are mouth-watering. A TV advertisement for a
brand of coffee had the sound of coffee being poured in the
background. The advertisement was so successful that it lasted five
years.
The colour of food and the colour of packaging are also very
important. If the colour of the food looks wrong, people won't eat it
because they associate food with certain colours. Nobody would eat
blue bread or drink blue beer. Therefore, in advertising food, purple
gray and, in some cases, white are unpopular colours.
How people expect something to taste often influences how it
actually does taste. Researchers gave some mineral water to two groups
of people. They told one group that the water was mineral water and
asked: "What does it taste like?" The answer was: "It tastes nice." Then
the researchers told the other group that the mineral water was tap
water. The second group said the water tasted a bit strange and not very
nice. The word 'tap' created an unpleasant image of chlorine.
It is the same for packaging. A food manufacturer was trying to
decide whether to sell his product in a glass jar or a can. He gave a
group of people the same product in both a glass jar and a can and
asked them to taste it. They all claimed that the product in the glass jar
tasted better.
So it seems to be true, image is everything.
