#584 Goodie Judgment

There’s an old saying that you can’t judge a book by its cover.
Yet most of us do.
And we do it everyday—unconsciously, pervasively, often with prejudice-before-thought.
We see a guy that’s dressed like a bum, we think bum. When a lady is dressed like a lady of the evening we assume she makes her living after dark.
Ethicists, moralists, and political correctivists bemoan this tendency, reminding us all that it’s the person not the packaging.
It seems they are wrong, and the lovely aphorism about book cover judging flies in the face of some basic human wiring. A fact that branding and marketing people know oh too well.
Scientists, those lovely people whose sole intent seems to be to rob life of some of its nicer mysteries, have recently demonstrated that children pick up packaging cues very early. And it not only influences their opinion, it influences a basic biological function—taste.
Children who were given healthy food rated its taste as being far better if it was wrapped in McDonald’s wrappers. That’s right, kids given milk and carrots responded to the taste better if the packaging told them they were Mc-milk and Mc-carrots.
And the reports were astonishingly high. In a study of 63 children, aged 3 to 5, tasting five pairs of identical foods and beverages, one in McDonald’s wrapping, one in unbranded packaging, 61 percent of the kids said they preferred the taste of the hypothetical McDonalds carrots.
Food and beverage marketing to children represents a 10 billion dollar industry in the US.
Apparently, it’s money well spent.
Some people conclude from this that if the fast food industry spent the same dollars to market healthful foods instead of high fat, calorie-dense food they might be able to improve kids’ nutrition instead of hurting it.
I doubt it. The studiers didn’t do one very important thing.
They didn’t compare carrots to french fries.
We may initially judge a book by its cover. We may even buy it. But that doesn’t mean we’ll get past the first chapter if it stinks.
Another basic truth: No one throws hamburgers at bad performers.
They throw vegetables.
America ya gotta love it