Appliances & Kitchen Gadgets

An Event Hog BrandStand.

(Credit: Event Hog)

There are perhaps only a few places and times when really great ideas are born into existence. While doing the dishes, in the shower, perhaps at the beach while watching the waves endlessly cycle through their inspiring rhythms. Or maybe the truly good ones are saved for another activity surrounding a liquid: Drinking beer in a parking lot with some buddies. Which is exactly how Event Hog got its start.

The team at Event Hog brainstormed their line of BrandStands as a central gathering spot at entertainment events. The theory stemmed from a simple idea of creating a familiar environment--a bar--and packing it up and putting it on wheels. Add some novel looking decor and you got yourself a bona fide attraction and gathering spot. Splash your brand identity all over the place and get people drunk to close the deal. It's a proud time-honored tradition of which I will not argue with.

Clients have ranged from Playboy to Budweiser and the BrandStands have inevitably ended up at tailgate events. Considering the genesis of the idea, drinking beers in a parking lot, it seems quite the appropriate venue for these portable bars. Perhaps, for your next brainstorming networking marketing schmooze fest you can take one of these things out for a tailgating party and come up with your own truly great ideas.

Via Bornrich

First Flavor Inc. tasteful advertising

(Credit: adage.com)

First Flavor Inc. has developed a new way to entice potential customers into trying new products: with Peel 'n Taste flavored advertising. Soon you'll be able to stroll down the aisle of your local supermarket and try before you buy.

This updated version of the scratch 'n' sniff sticker being created by First Flavor is a new way to market and advertise products. According to the company: "Using the latest in taste-matching technology, we replicate the flavor of your product and deliver it to consumers in a compact, dissolving edible film." The actual flavor strip can then be hygienically sealed and incorporated into anything from print advertising to in-store coupon dispensers.

So far the company has made a splash be replicating the flavor of grape juice, which seams reasonable enough. After all, consumers are already used to breath strips and teeth-whitening applications. Grape juice can't be too complex of a flavor. It is just grape juice after all. But what about fish sticks? Or frozen pizza? Or a supreme frozen pizza? Aside from the lack of texture, the only seemingly reasonable option would be to sample each flavor individually, crust, cheese, maybe one topping. Or perhaps just a distinctive flavor from the product, for example, maybe just the sauce. We all know what happens when you mix too many colors of paint together; far from deliciousness, you get mud. For now, as effective as these flavor strips may be, I'll stick to the simple flavors and save the chicken pot pie for the real thing.

This graph shows the activity in the brain's pleasure center; there's more activity with wine subjects think costs $90 a bottle (top line) than the same wine priced at $10. The arrow shows the moment when the subjects started tasting the wine.

(Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

In a study that could make marketing managers and salespeople rub their hands with glee, scientists have used brain-scanning technology to shed new light on the old adage, "You get what you pay for."

Researchers from the California Institute of Technology and Stanford's business school have directly seen that the sensation of pleasantness that people experience when tasting wine is linked directly to its price. And that's true even when, unbeknownst to the test subjects, it's exactly the same Cabernet Sauvignon with a dramatically different price tag.

Specifically, the researchers found that with the higher priced wines, more blood and oxygen is sent to a part of the brain called the medial orbitofrontal cortex, whose activity reflects pleasure. Brain scanning using a method called functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) showed evidence for the researchers' hypothesis that "changes in the price of a product can influence neural computations associated with experienced pleasantness," they said.

The study, by Hilke Plassmann, John O'Doherty, Baba Shiv, and Antonio Rangel, was published this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

This chart shows that people ranked taste of a $45 wine higher than the same wine priced at $5, and the same for a different wine marked $90 and $10.

(Credit: CalTech, Stanford)

The research, along with other studies the authors allude to, are putting a serious dent in economists' notions that experienced pleasantness of a product is based on its intrinsic qualities.

"Contrary to the basic assumptions of economics, several studies have provided behavioral evidence that marketing actions can successfully affect experienced pleasantness by manipulating nonintrinsic attributes of goods. For example, knowledge of a beer's ingredients and brand can affect reported taste quality, and the reported enjoyment of a film is influenced by expectations about its quality," the researchers said. "Even more intriguingly, changing the price at which an energy drink is purchased can influence the ability to solve puzzles."