What are you thinking when you buy milk?

A silly question, but one I’ve been asking myself lately. I’ve spent far too many minutes at Kroger, looking at all the brands and variations of milk: The packaging, the names, the information on the labels, the pricing, even the arrangements.

As part of Job No. 3, I’m part of a project to rebrand a particular company’s particular milk. (Actually, that’s what we’ve taken the mission to be; the client’s directive was, simply, “help me sell more milk.”) It’s Sweet Acidolphilus milk, which is the strange moniker given to this milk with a bunch of added vitamins and probiotics… There are a few companies that sell the stuff; some just call it Sweet Acidolphilus, while some others sell it (or a variation of it) with some sort of specific brand name (“Body Boost” is one). The company we’re doing the work for is in the former category, and packages the milk in a normal-shaped but yellow-colored milk jug, with their typical company label and the name “Sweet Acidolphilus” printed on it.

Ideas I’ve had so far for a new name: “Superacidolphilisticexbialidolphilus” (too long?) … “Divinity” (apparently the name of a candy I’ve never heard of, so that’s out) … “Up” (‘Drink Up,’ get it?) … there are others that are better, which is why I’m not mentioning them.

But it’s an interesting thing, to suddenly become more aware of the little differences within a very niche group of products. Maybe I’ll land a job with the company making the proverbial “better” mousetrap sometime.

***

As a rejoinder to Ugly Bathtub, I present really terrible local TV commercial of the day:

Oh, Trent… you can do way weirder than that. Have you met my friend Norton?

***

The problems with spam: Does someone get paid to do this stuff? And if so, does the company paying this person not realize how absolutely untargeted it is? Consider this array of spam, all culled from the past week in my junk mail folder:

Am I elderly? In puberty? Or, perhaps, a person with way too much money budgeted for canine cosmetics?

Then there’s the new phenomenon of comment spam, where some sort of program trolls for blogs and then leaves comments on those blogs. The In 3rds Protection Unit (I3PU) meticulously catches most of these (though I left a Snuggie one intact for good measure elsewhere on the site), but even if it didn’t, what good would it do? They’re usually conglomerations of meaningless words and phrases, thousands of them, with various links built in. Who’s going to click on them? Really?

Tags: Norton Furniture, spam, sweet acidophilus, Trent Bedding

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 8th, 2009 at 3.23 pm and is filed under Job No. 3. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.