Oodles of Noodles!
I have often said to Business Studies pupils that virtually anything can be used to illustrate something in business – indeed I have written four volumes about using football quotations to illustrate key elements.“Most of my money I spent on wine and women. The rest I squandered'”
- George Best
This can be used to illustrate budgeting, elasticity, planning etc.
You get the drift.
To prove a point I asked one of my Chinese pupils to pick a word/phrase and I’d Google it and from the results we’d have a business studies topic.
He said nothing – he was having his lunch at the time. (I often let pupils eat during lessons – it helps with concentration).
I suggested ‘bicycle’ or ‘football’ (thinking of the World Cup industry) but he didn’t seem interested.
‘Well how about Noodles then,’ I said, ‘as you are eating them.’
He looked at me if I was from another planet - but then I often find that I have that effect on pupils…
So, I googled ‘noodles’ and found an article about them on the Brand Republic site: http://www.brandrepublic.com/
This site is concerned with…branding.
According to an article on the 17th May:
“Pot Noodle remains the brand we love to hate, according to research exclusively revealed by Marketing. The online survey of almost 3000 UK consumers, carried out by marketing agency Joshua, showed that the snack-food brand drew even more votes this year than in the previous 'Brands we love and hate' report. It retains its status as the UK's most-hated brand, ahead of shopping channel QVC. Search engine Google led the most-loved brands with 31.6%; Tesco and Nokia swapped their previous rankings, second and third place respectively. 'One noticeable trend was the rise of technology companies among the most-loved brands,' says Joshua director Matthew Howells. 'Amazon entered the top 50 at number 17 while eBay has come straight in as the fourth-favourite brand”
Just this snippet is easily enough for:
- Market research
- Branding
- Loyalty
- Technology
But I decided to look some more and found this in The Times:
“Love, hate - and Pot Noodles
By Alan Hamilton
WHAT’S the thing we most love to hate? Why, it’s Pot Noodles. And what do we love best? Easy, it’s the Google search engine. Google is brilliant, because you can look up Pot Noodles on it, and discover that the dried snack beloved of impoverished students is suitable for vegetarians. Perhaps widely it steers clear of any other nutritional claims. In this context, love and hate is all about brand image. According to the latest annual survey by Marketing, the advertising trade magazine, we also detest, in descending order, the QVC shopping channel, Sainsbury’s Novon washing powder and McDonald’s.
What we perceive does not necessarily have anything to do with what we consume. Pot Noodles are heavily and often wittily advertised, and the factory in South Wales that produces them churns out 175 million pots every year. But among the 3,000 consumers interviewed for the survey, the image grates.
It may simply be snobbery; who wants to admit that they eat Pot Noodles? In its survey, Marketing reported that what helped to endear a particular brand image to the consumer was good service, customer loyalty, tradition, and a good online offering. But the magazine cautioned: “While these sentiments may be encouraging for brands, preference and consideration do not necessarily translate into sales.”
Advertising expenditure might also have something to do with it. According to the latest figures, Unilever Bestfoods, owner of Pot Noodle, only had Britain’s 22nd largest annual advertising budget at £44 million, with some of that going on more cherished brands such as Marmite. McDonald’s spent a paltry £41 million on its annual advertising budget.
Britain’s biggest advertiser is Procter & Gamble, which spends £199 million, £40 million more than its nearest rival, the Government. Money, in this instance, cannot buy silence; the company’s Head and Shoulders shampoo is well up the hate-list. Other detested retail names include Sunny Delight, Manchester United, Loyd Grossman sauces, the airlines Ryanair and easyJet, the computer companies Tiny and Time, and, rather more oddly, the Financial Times.
Our best-loved brands after Google are Tesco, Nokia, eBay and Persil. We also love Nike, adidas and Stella Artois. The Government does not appear as one of the most hated brands, whatever the reality away from the world of marketing may be. Surely that £159 million spent annually through the Central Office of Information cannot have bought the nation’s silence?“
Plenty of material there:
- Advertising
- Location
- Mass production
- Budgets
- Niche marketing
- Segments
- Government
Plenty of scope for future lessons …for example, fancy digressing into pornography?
In which case read the case study about semiotics and Pot Noodle:
“ Greg has been working with the Pot Noodle team at Unilever since April 2001, providing semiotic analysis and development of the brand. The first major audit threw up some interesting ideas which have served the brand well (see below) as well as some new product and branding concepts which are currently in the pipeline. In addition to the bigger picture, we also help with variant names and concepts, as well as script and packaging development.
Now banned in its original form 'The Slag of All Snacks' has made a huge impact on popular culture, from the Sun to The Guardian. It was inspired by semiotic analysis which suggested that Pot Noodle represented a form of Food Pornography - the idea that Pot took something wholesome like food and made it overly intense, objectified and rather sleazy. Apart from being funny, this ad campaign also built on Pot Noodle's distinctive honest and unpretentious heritage. “
Source: http://www.semiotic.co.uk/case-study/pot-noodle/
Also of interest is what is not covered in articles. The Times article mentions the placing of several brands but left out The Sun (www.the-sun.co.uk) which was at number 10 and Sky Sports (http://home.skysports.com/) at number 13.
Mind you, they’re both owned by News International – owners of The Times…
So that means we can also add ‘ethics’ and ‘bias’ to the list!
Chris Sivewright
PS
The Pot Noodle site: http://www.fuelofbritain.co.uk/ is well worth a visit!
posted by Duncan Williamson @ 2:33 AM
1 Comments:
I think that technique of encouraging anyone to think and work in such a way is creative and exceptionally valuable and I wish I'd thought of it.
Excellent!
Duncan
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