Saturday, December 30, 2006

The last supper (spam again...)

Christmas binge over, I wasnt that surprised to see that Little Chef is about to go the way of the sit down Wimpy and close its doors. The word is that its lack of evolvement in its offering has made it increasingly irrelevant given todays perceived desire for healthier lifestyles. Which is strange given latest projections for overweight / obesity published by the HSE, indicating that there's nothing more we'd like than to tuck into a plate of over priced, fatty food with a sprig of limp lettuce to make you feel better about what you're about to do to yourself.

Some brands don't need to evolve. Coke (and Pepsi) famously tried to tamper with their winning formula, and look where that got them (Malcolm Gladwell has a nice piece about this very thing in his "Blink" tome which is worth looking at for those with a penchant for product testing getting off to the wrong start). Other brands, however, become topics of public and political debate, fast food in particular, and see themselves having to evolve their product line to accomodate notions of what's right or wrong for us (there's always the off button, but people seem to forget this all to easily).

Can't concentrate too hard today, as the kids have just declared war on each other (again) and the seemingly innocuous task of designing a film poster has spiralled into a hate campaign though the language of scrawls.

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