Seattle Bewilderment Blog

Seattle #20: Street fairs and parades

9/2/2018

Americans love them, they're frequent, and they're done extremely well. Much better than Australia's poor attempts at Christmas parades.
- My first was Fremont Fair, which starts with a naked bike ride, and gets further liberal and artsy from there. If I hit my gym goal, I'll ride next year.
- A week later the Pride Parade blew my socks off, but at four hours, it was ridiculously long. FOUR HOURS!
- The Seafair Parade was weird and creepy. The grand marshals were a couple white, male B-list actors who had achieved moderate success. The floats were mostly three pretty women from a local rural food item festival awkwardly waving at everybody, corporate groups, military drill teams (very creepy to non-Americans), ethnic groups, marching bands (these were actually really good) and waving politicians with their entourages.

Next up, I need to go to county fairs. I can't wait to find out how they compare to Australian Royal Shows.

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Seattle #12: How judgmental people are of food, especially non-organic food

15/12/2017

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Tonight, a complete stranger in my apartment building walked up to me eating my dinner on the communal rooftop area to point out the BBQ sauce was a cheap one that uses high fructose corn syrup. I checked the label, and sure enough, it's the first listed ingredient, and therefore main ingredient. Something I wish I knew when I bought it. Good to know. Really.

He then went on to explain he only buys organic, and the lack of the word 'organic' on the label' is another reason he wouldn't buy it. I had to bite my tongue before I made a comment about how blindly following such things is foolish. I could easily have given him many specific examples where it's simply a money-maker because the items were organic anyway, there is little or no advantage or a serious disadvantage for certain foods to be organic, or certain foods aren't really organic because of greedy companies labeling non-organic items as organic to boost their profits.

I did that 'smile and nod' thing I have heard so much about. It worked wonders. He moved on to ask what I do and what my thesis is on. Of course I excitedly told him it's on food labeling, and how we can alter consumers perceptions, even taste perceptions of foods through packaging. I grabbed the sauce bottle and used it as a prop to explain how we marketers can get consumers to pay more by making them *think* something is premium, when it really isn't.

He...did not like that. He did not like that at all.

Other label gimmicks are rampant. Chickens here can't be given growth hormones or raised in cages, but every chicken product in the supermarket has to say "hormone and cage free", lest consumers think the company that doesn't do this is worse than the others. Not to mention gluten free items for product types that have no gluten to begin with.
Game show idea: give three marketers 30 minutes in a supermarket to find as many products that they can that do this. Winner gets a year's supply of fat-free yogurt that is packed wish sugar.

Addendum:
My favorite podcast did an episode on organic food, and I'm stoked they mention the type of research my thesis was on. In blind taste tests people think vegetables *labelled* organic taste better (when it definitely doesn't).
I'm tempted to do a talk on organic food and market it to people who consume organic food, if only for the schadenfreude of being like a person telling a class of kids Santa isn't real.
To be clear, I'm not saying it isn't good, but it is not what most people think it is. Check out the Organic Food episode of Science Vs podcast.

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#3 Americans are loud.

13/10/2017

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I know this is a stereotype we've all heard and perhaps observed at times, possibly much to our amusement at the reception desk of a museum in Milan, *ahem,* but today I was in Pike Place Market, and two middle-aged grocers, standing perhaps 2 meters (yards) away from each other were yelling their conversation at each other. Do they always use their outside voice, or was their conversation about why that specific breed of asparagus is tastier because of a certain chemical perhaps a work of performance art designed to increase sales? I don't know.

Seriously though, us Australians are just as loud as Americans, myself doubly so, so I think I may have found my people. I'm especially loving how friendly people in the Pacific North West (PNW) are - as friendly as West Australians, which I have found nowhere else. It didn't take long to be glad this is my new home.

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Seattle #20: Street fairs and parades

Seattle #12: How judgmental people are of food, especially non-organic food

#3 Americans are loud.

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Seattle #20: Street fairs and parades

​Seattle #12: How judgmental people are of food, especially non-organic food

#3 Americans are loud.

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Seattle #12: How judgmental people are of food, especially non-organic food