P3: Socioeconomics and Potato Chip Advertising

Freedman and Jurafsky posit that the language of food advertising is directly correlated to which economic class the product is targeted toward. Through analyzing 12 potato chip brands, 6 expensive and 6 inexpensive, they provide a convincing analysis for their hypothesis. The expensive chips are targeted towards the upper class and the inexpensive to the lower/middle class. They examine the language used on the packaging, specifically. Their findings show that the more expensive potato chips have more complex language on their bags, and have much more of an emphasis on being healthier, using terms like ‘natural’ and stressing the production techniques and lack of preservatives. What I found most interesting in the article is that the more expensive chips relied more on negation than on promotion of their own products- assuring the consumer that their product lacks preservatives, trans fat, etc., and therefore implying that their competitors’ products DO have these things. I had also never really considered the strong correlation with language and the focus of the ad with socioeconomic classes specifically, so it’s interesting to think about it through that lens. Rather than simply providing motivation to buy their product, they use the comparison with other products to show why theirs is more desirable.

I think this method of food advertising analysis could be applied to almost any type of food. One that springs to mind specifically is pizza. I think it would be very interesting to apply this some methodology to pizza chains like Dominoes or Pizza Hut, which are typically marketed to a lower-class audience, and more bourgeois pizza places, like Denver’s Organic Pizza Company and similar specialty pizza shops. My hypothesis would be that a similar phenomenon would be seen- the specialty pizza places with more of an emphasis on natural ingredients and lack of the things we typically associate as the unhealthy parts of pizza. The chains would probably exhibit simpler language in their advertising if this trend were followed, which I think it would be.