I'm always fascinated by these kinds of product rivalries, and always assume they arouse great passions among the people involved, and meanwhile the rest of us really don't notice or care. I think there are people at Campbell's who hate Progresso with all of their hearts and souls. Late at night, they sit in their offices on the 75th floor of the Massive Building overlooking Times Square, glasses of scotch in their hands, hair tousled, eyes low and dark, muttering, "Progresso ... oh, Progresso, you will pay. You have more sodium in your Chicken Stars than has ever been in ours, and you know it. I will rip the cover off your facade and expose your true face to the teeming masses ... or something along those lines ... so help me God!" And then thunder lights the sky as they thrust their arms into the air and laugh maniacally.
Or maybe it's just a committee of gray-suited people in a white, flourescent-lit windowless room, saying "According to this chart, Progresso has disparaged the sodium content of our soups. According to this next graph, we can now make ads disparaging their sodium content. According to this graph, this decision has now been made. And according to this graph, this meeting is adjourned and we must all now go to Chili's and eat small taco-shaped objects covered with ranch dressing and barbeque ribs." Then there is two seconds of staccato applause.
But I don't like to think that. I like to think that there a lot of people expending a lot of energy and time -- and indeed, their whole lives -- into things like proving that Progresso actually has more sodium in their soups than Campbell's. Meanwhile, the rest of us are completely unaffected and often don't even hear about it. We just buy whatever seems cheapest. It's beautiful somehow -- we're such an affluent society that we can subsidize tremendous dramas that seem terribly momentous to some people but actually have no affect on anything, ever. I love it.
3 comments:
I think the problem is that Campbell's and Progresso used to have a healthy respect for each other's niches. Progresso came on the scene and cornered the fancy soup market. Their ads were basically, "Our soups are fancy and not condensed". Then Campbell's would just ignore them because they were all "our soup is cheap and you can make weird casseroles". Then people like Wolfgang Puck and numerous others started really putting out really fancy soup, so then Campbell's started getting into the fancy soup business. Now Progresso is panicking and losing a foothold. And strangely, they have become the cheapest non-condensed soup, but they are still pushing the whole sodium thing in regards to the condensed soup, which I don't think that many people care about. If you are worried about sodium, you should generally stay away from soup. Salt is sort of inherent in soup production. Here's another question: Who's eating so much canned soup? There is almost a whole aisle of the grocery store dedicated to it.
so, to answer your question: Yes, I think this is interesting.
Wow, there's a lot more to this story than I realized! That's for the inside baseball on this major national controversy.
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