Sign of Lousy Economic Times

August 8th, 2009, 1 Comment »

Treat yourself! To gum!

Treat Yourself

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Trident Gum, Now Less Intense

May 21st, 2008, 10 Comments »

I bought some gum today, and noticed something a little odd on the package:

Trident Gum, Now Less Intense

In our bang zoom culture of bigger! and better! and now-with-20%-more-pants!, it’s noteworthy to see Trident promoting their gum as ‘less intense”.

I do take issue with their copy-writing. How many people discriminate between “more flavour” and “less intensity”. I’m no food expert, but I associate the notion of flavour with intensity. That is, if something is more flavourful, it’s also more intense. Is that notion incorrect?

Likewise, there’s a little symbol (like an asterisk, but it’s a cross–what’s the official name of that superscript marker?) indicating that there are further details elsewhere on the package. When you turn the package over, the explanation reads “More flavour and less intense than previous Trident Spearmint”. That seems kind of redundant, no?

In any case, I’d be curious to see the market research that drove Trident’s decision to get off the bigger, better treadmill.

10 Comments »