Potato Chips: the universal food

Throughout our lives I’m sure all of us have heard the phrase, “you are what you eat”. However, when you think about this more, it must also be true that you are what you buy. In this article Freedman and Jurafsky explore the ways in which advertising changes depending on the people they are trying to appeal to. They did this through the examination of the potato chip industry. They separated the potato chips into groups based on price, with one group being the “expensive” chips and the other the “inexpensive” chips. The expensive chips tended to be advertising to the upper class while the inexpensive chips were trying to appeal to the middle and lower class. The way that they are able to do this is through the use of different language. The more expensive chips on average had more words and longer words than the inexpensive chips; this is because wealthier people tend to be more educated than middle and lower class people and, therefore, are more attracted to sophisticated packaging. Wealthier people also have more freedom when it comes to the products that they can buy so they try to eat the healthier products even if they are more expensive. Therefore, the more expensive bags of chips contain more words that are health related such as healthier, low fat, no cholesterol, and low sodium. This use of negative language implies to the consumer that the other products have these bad things in them, so you should buy their product to be healthier. Another big part of chip advertising is the emphasis of “authenticity”. Freedman and Jurafsky say that, ”For the upper class, being authentic means being natural”. This means that more expensive packaging contains many words emphasizing the naturalness of the product and a lack of artificial or fake ingredients. Meanwhile, “, for the working class, authenticity is rooted in historicity, including family tradition, the model of a company as a family business with an explicit founder, and regional American locations”. This means that for the working class they are able to connect more with advertising that contains more mention of things such as it being a family or hometown business. I found it interesting that there is such a connection between a product and a person. I didn’t realize that the product that a person buys is so closely related to their values such as health and family. This essay opened my eyes to other food products and how they are able to appeal to the consumer in similar ways. I think these same principles could be found in the beer industry. I feel that if you look at the ways that beer companies try to appeal to their target demographic you could see some glaring similarities. For example, the lower and middle class are mostly concerned with price while the upper class is concerned with things like the expert craftsmanship.