There is not a particular ad for this product that I could find, only the marketing on the packaging and the website. For my analysis, please take a brief look at this website:
https://lesserevil.com/
DESCRIPTION: These snacks protray a happy, serene Buddha holding a bowl of popcorn. The art and text is simple and spacious, but also prominently displays their various certifications. The website instantly reveals the demographic they are aimed towards, because the first thing it says is "Official Snack Sponsor of Wanderlust Festivals." For any who don't know, Wanderlust is a huge annual yoga festival. Although yoga isn't particularly tied to Buddhism, it isn't uncommon for many modern people with some spiritual leanings to adopt a variety of eastern ideas into their own western ones. Buddha figurines are often seen adorning people's homes, offices, massage studios, doorways of all kinds, and various works of art. The fact that now its on a bag of popcorn is really no surprise. I don't see this brand at the regular grocery stores, but it is popular enough that it is in all the major "health food" stores.
ANALYSIS: This company would like you to believe that they are benevolent, there for you, available for personal connection. This company pushes the message "YOU CAN TRUST US." This persuasive technique is not one which is mentioned in the book, but it is quickly becoming one of the most popular strategies and is also my least favorite. It is not possible that a corporation wants to connect with you personally, beyond product assistance. Where I work does this - "emotional connection" is a marketing technique we are encouraged to use in order to keep the customer shopping at our store. Current marketing strategies are preying on our need for connection and using it in a phony way, rather than the organic way in which it is actually useful. That isn't to say that the founders of this company aren't nice, caring people, but people care for one another. A company does not care for you.
In a less forward manner, they use (and this may sound odd) simultaneous plain folks approach AND snob appeal. That is the only way to describe it, although I don't want to imply that "plain folks" are not health conscious or that caring about what you put in your body makes you a snob (It doesn't - it makes you conscious of your health, one of the most important things you've got. Besides, I've seen just as many people be snobby about the number of burritos they can eat in one sitting as about turning up their nose at fried chicken.) I say plain folks because they emphasize that though their ingredients are better, their pricing is no higher than regular snacks of the greater evil variety (this is true - it's $1.25 per single serving bag if you order the 6 pack off the website). Besides, it is chips and popcorn. "Indulge, like everyone else!" they seem to say (bandwagon appeal), "but better!" (snob appeal). Let me add a caveat here - it isn't snobby to be health conscious, but it is a wee bit snobby that as part of their campaign, they bring in mindfulness (as in the meditation practice) as being made more possible in your eating by these snacks. I am drinking a beer exceedingly mindfully right now, thank you very much. I can experience it through all 5 senses, feel how it goes down and enters each part of my body (well, down to the digestive tract, in which I have no sensory nerves.) Having to buy a particularly snack to be mindful is missing the point.
There is some association prcinciple at play here. There is the aforementioned mindfulness (we already feel like snacks help us feel better anyway, what if we can take that a little further and say they make us feel spiritual and enlightened, like the Buddha?). Also, there is the association with Wanderlust (and thus yoga and sunny good festival times). There is no connection, other than sponsorship, between popcorn and yoga (although the website tried to draw some sparse connections by pulling the currently popular Ayurveda-card when talking about their ghee-flavored popcorn).
I think the success of their company shows that their platform is fairly successful. They appeal to a lot of people's sensibilities. There are a confusingly large amount of people who found it worth their time to talk about them on youtube videos. Have fun with these.
Spoiler: She thinks that they are calorie free
Here's another (this woman is a proffesional):
There's about 10 minutes of your life well spent. Lots more where that came from!
Bottom line: People are impressed with the simplicity and purity of ingredients (and this seems to be the case whether or not they know what those ingredients are, so that's interesting.)
INTERPRETATION: This ad/marketing technique is not new or different as far as touting purity and quality. The reason it caught my eye is the Buddha figure paired with calling the snacks a "Lesser Evil" (value judgement paired with a religious figure) and equating healthy eating with mindfulness (which are only so tangentially related as to nt be worth mentioning when it comes to commercial snacks). They are geared toward health conscious and weight conscious westerners who still want to snack and may or may not do yoga or have some eclectic claims of spirituality. I find it silly that a Buddha would be included on the front of a bag of popcorn. It is similar to placing Muhammad or Jesus on the front of a bag of popcorn and claiming that this bag of popcorn will bring you closer to the ideals of that religion. Buddha is such a ubiquitous figure in our culture, yet with such little understanding of the history or practice of Buddhism, that this symbol, which is held dear to many people, is reduced to trinkets and a snack mascot. It made me notice it; it did not make me buy it. Buddhist imagery and concepts used for commercial gain is a shame.
EVALUATION: The strengths of this packaging and website are the simplicity and navigability of its art. Everything, from pictures to wording, is very simple, reaching a large audience. The weakness is that it perpetuates stereotypes and strips sanctity of beloved figures. I suppose that this makes it memorable, but it doesn't pop out and grab you like some showier ads. However, it seems effective. The odd thing is that, although yoga-practicing middle class urban America was who I assumed it reached out to, all the YouTube videos I saw were by southern women on restricted calorie diets. Maybe it is missing their target audience but cathcing success in another.
ENGAGEMENT: Lesser Evil uses their social media to post pretty, feel-good pictures. Take a looksie at this one:
I could not get the picture itself to embed, but seriously, it is laughable.
I found an article which is about a much wider topic, but actually, to my surprise, included the same sentiments about the chips. I highly recommend giving this short article a read. It emphasizes what I've said about these chip bags, while bringing in a much wider perspective about our culture doing this as a whole.
Culturally Appropriating Buddhism
Clearly, these snack makers didn't mean any harm. I imagine that they felt they were doing some good. Still, I would not go out of my way to buy this product, but that isn't a fair assessment on my part because I tend not to buy bagged chips or popcorn of any variety. Still, I would not recommend them to a friend. I might point them out to a friend and say my thoughts about it. Either the friend would agree with me, or I would act as an inadvertent advertisement and my friend would come back to the store to purchase every flavor later. Hard to say.
Hope you enjoyed the read! Have a wonderful weekend!
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