FADS Marketing: Food, Alcohol, Drugs, Sex and the New Marketing World Order

LOCAL AUTHOR

This book is an excellent example of what a book about marketing should be. In FADS Marketing: Food, Alcohol, Drugs, Sex and the New Marketing World Order, Tony Harris uses a no-nonsense approach in explaining to the reader how marketers are now dictating what consumers want. He reveals secrets and stories that most people have never heard of. The book is broken down into chapters for each topic of discussion: Food, Alcohol, Drugs, and Sex. Each chapter was informative and included interesting facts and examples of how marketing has changed over the years. For example, nowadays, marketers are very focused on the specialty food products of today. People want to be special. They want to be in an “exclusive” group of people who eat a special brand of almond butter because it is “elite.” Because marketers imply that they will be like the skinny, pretty girl on the screen if they just eat that brand of premium almond butter. Marketers are programming individuals to like the products that they want the consumer to think is better. Another interesting fact about food is that marketers and product producers know that people expect a certain color or texture of food. For example, food coloring is added to cheese to make it orange even though the cheese itself is not naturally this color. Harris goes on to list a few reasons why people think that cheese should be orange. The chapter on alcohol is also very interesting. In it, Harris tells the story about a malt beverage called Zima that was developed in the nineties. Over time, Zima was deemed to be a “female” oriented drink, so many males did not want to touch the stuff. They tried to market it to a mass population of both genders but ultimately failed. Fast forward to today’s products made by Skinnygirl. These drinks are catered only to women. It doesn’t mean that a man could not drink a Skinnygirl drink, but the marketing–including the packaging and the fact that the drinks boast lower calories (and lower calories equal a slimmer waistline, right?)–are mainly geared toward women. Food, Alcohol, Drugs and Sex all sell. These topics are also some of the most controversial ones both in the United States and overseas. Overall, this book had some very interesting stories and marketing tactics that the average person would not know about. I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in how marketing works and wants to learn about some interesting products and marketing campaigns.