Tag Archives: marketing

When is a soda not a soda?

My 14-year-old daughter stopped at the dep on her way home from school last week, looking for a snack after a lengthy extra-curricular activity. The depanneur (convenience store) is right next to the school and very familiar with the teen students in their plaid kilt uniforms. 

Smirnoff Raspberry Soda

Deceptive packaging makes this look like a regular soda.

She bought a can of low-calorie raspberry soda and hopped on the bus home. But the soda tasted strange. Way too sweet. So she checked the ingredient list and was shocked to find it contained 4% alcohol. 

“Um, Mom? I bought alcohol by mistake.”

Turns out what she actually bought was a Smirnoff cooler with a raspberry & soda flavour. The Smirnoff label is very prominent but like the average 14-year-old, she didn’t know or recognize the brand name. Everything else about the packaging (see photo) suggests this was a soft drink. 

Initially, we laughed off her error and poured it down the sink. I told her how glad I was that she told me about it. She wasn’t at fault and certainly wasn’t in trouble.

Then I got upset. And the more I thought about it, the angrier I got. But not with her.

First of all, I was upset that the dep employee sold alcohol to a 14-year-old wearing the familiar high school uniform (she even had on a hoodie with the school name). She wasn’t challenged or asked for identification. Moreover, the product wasn’t in a beer and cooler fridge, surrounded by other products obviously containing alcohol; it was in a six-pack on a shelf next to some bananas and snack foods. 

Mostly, however, I was upset about the packaging for this product. It’s easy to see how a teenager unfamiliar with the Smirnoff brand might think it’s a soda. The most obvious marketing messages in this packaging design are about the low calorie nature of the beverage and the raspberry soda flavour. Even if a young person was deliberately seeking alcohol, it makes it seem so benign. And the sugary sweet taste promoted by the beverage suggests it’s designed for young drinkers.

The whole mixup seems particularly onerous in the wake of the death from alcohol poisoning last month of another 14-year-old girl from Laval. Athena Gervais had reportedly been drinking a high sugar alcoholic beverage called FCKD UP purchased from a nearby depanneur. Laval-based Groupe Geloso, which manufactured the drink, announced soon after that it was stopping production and pulling it from shelves. Similar to the American beverage, Four Loko, the drinks are very high in alcohol and caffeine – and both brands appeal to youth.

It seems the problem is bigger than just those one or two particular drinks. Can we address the way packaging and marketing specifically appeals to underage drinkers? How it is deliberately promoted to seem like candy or energy drinks or soda as if it were completely safe for all?

The day after this incident, I went over t0 the depanneur where my daughter bought this drink. Full of mama rage, I confronted the owner. To his credit, he was shocked and horrified and apologized immediately. He recognized that placing these drinks next to snack foods and away from the rest of the alcohol could be confusing to students and pledged to move them right away. And he promised to reinforce to all his employees that the legal age for alcohol consumption in Quebec is 18, and they must demand identification to prove their age. My 14-year-old could easily pass for older, but she was wearing a high school uniform and thus clearly no older than 17. She claims the worker showed zero interest in what she was purchasing. 

I was satisfied with the owner’s response and proud of my daughter for speaking up. But I remain concerned about this kind of misleading advertising. There are many reasons why alcohol consumption can be dangerous for teens, from alcohol poisoning to addiction, heightened risk of assault, drinking and driving, and decreased judgment. This kind of marketing is unethical and it’s our kids who pay the price.

   Send article as PDF   

How much privacy does your kid give up in 1 hour?

This fabulous article from Common Sense Media (one of my favourite non-profit sites for frank reviews of movies, TV shows, books and music for kids and teens) tracks one woman’s efforts to figure out what information is given away when her 12-year-old daughter plays and does homework online.

Christina Tynan-Wood writes about her decision to allow her pre-teen to have an account on Facebook, despite that site’s policy of only allowing those 13 and over to legally open an account. She isn’t alone – it’s an issue I’ve struggled with as well. Like Tynan-Wood, I felt that saying no to Facebook had a social impact for my twin daughters. And as I discuss in this article, allowing them on the social media website with strict rules and supervision meant I could help them make sense of it while they were young enough to still listen to their mom.  According to Consumer Reports, 7.5 million Facebook users are under 13.

One practical impact of the parental decision to allow our kids on Facebook is the massive amount of information these (and other) sites are able to collect about their activities online.

It’s the social networking sites, though, that give me the most pause. It might not seem like a big deal: She installs a silly app, plays a game, “LOLs” on photos, posts a picture, announces what she’s doing, creates a fake job, and “marries” her classroom crush. She’s having a blast.

But the apps aren’t really free. She often “pays” for them by allowing access to her — and sometimes her friends’ — profiles. Add this to the information that she and her friends willingly provide, even the fact that they’re friends, and collect it all into a dossier, and you’d have quite a portrait of my little girl and her crew. The companies that collect this data claim that they never connect this information to individuals, and Facebook prohibits app makers from transmitting data to outside companies — but large breaches have happened.

And what happens when my baby isn’t a baby anymore? Will “the machine” have created a detailed analysis by then of what sort of employee, insurance risk, or student she’ll be? Will it understand that she was playing around when she claimed to work at IHOP? Will it know that the girls didn’t understand what it meant when they called each other prostitutes? Will it strip these games of context, feed it to a database as fact, and sell it to credit companies, insurance agencies, employers, colleges, marketing firms, or the highest bidder? That sounds paranoid. But there have been so many mistakes, break-ins, breaches, and accidents in the world of data collection that the CEO of Sony recently announced publicly that he can’t guarantee the security of Sony’s video game network or any other Web system in the “bad new world” of cybercrime.

These are really important questions. We tend to be kind of laid-back about it because we can’t really see it happening on the surface, but the sheer amount of information collected about our kids is staggering. How will this affect them when they are 25? 40? The answer is we don’t really know. But clearly crossing our fingers and hoping for the best isn’t the best reaction.

The first response is awareness, among both parents and their kids. The second is education. How can we fine tune our security settings and firewalls? What kinds of information should never be given out online? How can we stay on top of the information about us and our children that is out there on the web? These are important questions to have with your kids from the time they are old enough to open their first Club Penguin or Moshi Monsters account. These are some of the questions I’ll be looking at in depth in future posts, and I welcome any comments or suggestions from readers.

   Send article as PDF