Are there any parents working in the marketing departments of candy/chocolate brands?
I really wish the answer was ‘no’, because the reality hurts me.
Do you have any idea?
In any market you enter to do your shopping, you see colourful, attractive, mind-blowing, hypnotizing candy and chocolate boxes and packages everywhere! It’s almost like a cladding; on walls, in the entrances and exits, with or without special decors…
I feel like I’m walking into an M&M store or a chocolatier every time I enter a grocery store, even though I’m only there to buy some fruit and vegetables!
Don’t you feel uncomfortable (or guilty) exposing children to such harmful food advertisements?
Believe me and be with me on this: We must prevent products that are harmful to children’s health from being displayed outside their own shelves!
This mind-blowing and harmful marketing style is not a strategy, it’s an inhuman and unconscious pressure, saying ‘harm yourself’, ‘harm your child’, ‘risk your health!
I bet these brands are lost. They should wake up. And the people working with them need to remember their humanity and stop hurting children.
How cheap can you act?
The use of traditional channels in marketing isn’t new, and neither is in-store advertising, but this ‘smothering’ is new. STOP IT!
Did you know that despite thousands of projects carried out throughout the world for years, no country has been able to prevent obesity? Obesity rates have YET not decreased. (Raising Girls, p. 145, Steve Biddulph)
I wouldn’t be surprised if candy marketers started their meetings with a sentence like this:
‘Here are this year’s marketing activities we carried out with the sponsorship of diabetes drugs.’
All markets are now decorated with products like chocolate and candies not only on special occasions such as Halloween, Christmas, Eid, etc., but every day!
The question you are asking yourself is quite obvious: ‘How can I encourage a child to persuade his/her parent to buy a harmful product?’
This can’t be marketing – not anymore!
‘Every child, every person should consume this type of food once in a while!’ All right, but obviously ‘once in a while’ is not enough for the brands!
The effects of your empathyless ‘no matter what, sell more’ marketing actions are as follows:
—Every child is consuming more chocolate
—Their consumption desire for harmful foods becomes so gigantic that they choose ‘unlimited eating’ at the first moment of freedom they encounter.
As a marketing professional and a mother, I am deeply saddened by this giant hypocrisy.
Be careful! Of course, brands should do marketing, of course, they will take actions to persuade, but not in such an unconscious and foolish way.
Combining chocolate and candy with entertainment themes is a mediocre, but often correct, method. Yet today, this method is used so greedily and wrongly that I am pretty sure that most parents feel as if they are depriving their children of something when they exit a grocery store without any chocolate and candy.
There are also social responsibility projects and warnings circulating around this brainwashing process that no one sees, such as:
- ‘Let’s move’ projects
A structure that disrupts the child’s health cannot lead him to a healthy life! So thanks for your recommendation, but as far as health is concerned, we prefer to hear from someone else!
- ‘It is recommended to consume 1 spoon daily.’
Thank you for the challenge! But why are the jars getting bigger and bigger then?
Just tragicomic! The louder brands shout ‘take me’, the less clear these ‘healthyish’ projects and texts become.
Some more questions on hypocrisy-based actions:
❓ Why is Elsa – the main and XXS-size character of the movie ‘Frozen’ – trying to sell us a huge box of chocolates?
❓ Why is Harry Potter giving children the key to an adventure full of magic for 10 boxes of chocolates in return?
Today, you can buy a whole pack of candies for the price of a banana. Thus, the situation is even worse for families with financial difficulties. ‘Access to the unhealthy is easy, access to health care is difficult!’ – here is the intolerable reality of our world.
I am now tired of explaining to my child why we should consume less chocolate and candies every time we enter a grocery store, tired of trying to manage the feeling of ‘prohibition’ created by these limitations, and tired of answering her recurring question: ‘If they’re harmful, then why?’
The worst part is, we used to really crave some chocolates (before the brands flooded everywhere in shops with candies). We would go and discover some, and we would savor this rare mischief together. I would do that as an adult too. But these small joys have disappeared because those little gaps are clogged with their traps.
We all know that no one can prevent the increasing awareness about healthy eating thanks to:
- all kinds of experiences that convince the whole world that health is a must for a good life
- experts who use social media wonderfully
- articles that are accessible to everyone
So these brands try to make their last hit before they go.
I understand the company, but I can’t understand the people working for them.
PS: You don’t need to be a parent to know that it’s wrong for a child to be exposed to harmful foods that scream ‘Eat me’ every time they look around.
One last word:
Sweets, chocolates and unhealthy children’s foods should be displayed in their own reserved sections. Supermarkets can be used as media, but they should not be turned into a showroom for unhealthy products!
Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash
