Attracting Spec-Taters

I recently read an article entitled “Authenticity in America: Class Distinctions in Potato Chip Advertising” by Joshua Freedman and Dan Jurafsky. The authors discussed, in depth, the marketing strategies of potato chip companies. They analyzed how different audiences are targeted based on socioeconomic standing. There are many strategies considered by these companies; however, one in particular is the manipulation of language.

Freedman and Jurafsky carefully looked at the text used on the packaging of twelve different potato chip brands. They examined the bags (all containing plain potato chips) of six brands that were more affordable and six brands that were higher end. The language used in these two groups differed slightly. The more expensive potato chip brands tended to use longer sentences, more complex grammar, and rarer words those on the cheaper chip bags. In fact, the reading level of the text used in the more expensive group was at a tenth or eleventh grade reading level, while that of the less expensive group was at about an eighth grade level. More costly chips also have, on average, 142 words on each bag, while the others have only about 104.

An infinite number of other products could be analyzed in a similar way. It would be interesting to see how many words are used and how complex the language used to market a product is. Rather than just looking at the packaging of the product itself, this type of analysis could be applied to advertisements of all sorts—billboards, magazines, etc. It would be interesting to see if the same observations that Freedman and Jurafsky had with the potato chip bags are consistent in other advertisements for other products.