On Marketing Things by Calling them Dangerous and Bad

 Are you you familiar with the Nestle's Lion Bar? 

It's a product available in the UK, and as a US resident, I'd never had one. I was gifted one last month by a family member who knows I like to try foods not typically sold in the US. I looked forward to trying it, but when I did I stopped after a couple of bites. I didn't like it much at all--there's textural interest as it contains both rice crisps and wafer cookies, with "creme" between the wafers and caramel in there somewhere, but it is overpoweringly sweet. For me, it was so sweet as to be actively unpleasant. But that's not what I'm here to talk to you about!

It interested me to see that at the bottom right corner of the top of the product packaging, there is an overall nutrition rating provided. Rather than the useless health proclamations so often found on US products (like a bag of sugar I saw truthfully but very unhelpfully proclaiming "FAT FREE!"), products are given an overall rating, as on a report card. The possible ratings are A, B, C, D and E (there is no F, the E is essentially the F grade). And the Lion Bar's rating was E, shown in bright red. The label makes it clear: this chocolate confection is bad for you. Really bad for you. The least nutritious kind of choice possible. 

The intent of regulators is that a consumer will see the "this food is bad!" label, and be deterred from buying it. It doesn't work. In fact, I'd be willing to argue it actually drives more sales.  

If you look at the history of the Lion Bar, you can see this in action. The bar has been around for many years, but in the 20th century it was manufactured by a British company called Rowntree's, who advertised the bar as being as magnificent as a lion, and as large and filling. Then Nestle bought it, and in 2004 they did a product relaunch, with a major television ad campaign and themed product giveaways at elaborate mall displays. The relaunched bar bore the slogan "Dangerously Better." And that was the title of the ad campaign as well. 

Below is the television commercial in storyboard form, illustrated with clips from the ad. What you will see is a man of about 20 approaching a vending machine in what looks like a train station. The vending machine sells nothing but Lion Bars, and bears numerous hazard signs that warn "Dangerously Better." The man shrugs, inserts a coin, and puts his hand in the opening to pick up his bar. But his arm gets yanked into the vending machine. The man screams as his face is slammed into the vending machine, and then his body begins to flip and spin implausibly in exaggerated, bloodless, cartoonish violence. The camera cuts from the screaming, twirling man to focus on the face of a passing boy of perhaps 8, who stares anxious yet fascinated as the screams continue, but his mother pulls him away. Then there is a quick clip of a lion roaring, after which the view returns to focusing on the man, who stops spinning like a propeller. He gasps and pulls his arm out from the vending orifice. His jacket and shirt sleeves have been torn away, but his arm looks fine, and it hold the Lion Bar. He stares at it for a moment, then tears open the wrapper, opens his mouth wide, and like a striking predator, tears off a chunk. He then chews with an expression of ecstasy on his face. Behold:

 (If you want, you can watch the actual ad here.) 

The main consumer group for the original Rowntree's Lion Bar had been men 18-34. Nestle was fine with the gendered consumer base, but wanted to aim to capture a younger audience of boys 18 and younger. They changed the candy bar formula, making the bar sweeter, milkier, and softer. And they commissioned a new ad campaign.

You might imagine that a business trying to market their product to children would want an ad campaign that was gentler and more innocent than their old ads aimed at adult men. Instead, the marketing became hyperviolent (at a cartoonish level that couldn't be taken seriously by adults), and declarations of dangerousness appeared in the ads and on the Lion Bar labels.  

What the ad campaign sold to kids was an association between masculinity, rebelliousness, risking danger, surviving the dangerous odds, and euphoria. In the ad, a man shrugs at warning signs, buys the candy anyway, gets subjected to a dangerous, wild ride, but emerges with his prize, and takes violent, voluptuous pleasure in consuming it. A young boy is fascinated, scared, intrigued, but his mother pulls him away from the thrilling vending machine. He's young and small and has to go where she pulls him--and sensibly, she pulls him away from the danger. But soon he'll get bigger! He won't be a mama's boy anymore. He'll be able to ignore the nagging and warning of mothers and authorities that say something is dangerous, bad for you, risky, antisocial, and do what Real Men do: take the risks, ignore the danger, and reap the delicious proscribed reward!

This marketing tactic of celebrating foolish risks was already well-established in the aughties. After all, they followed the 1990s megatrend of marketers calling everything "extreme"--sodas, nachos, deodorant--in ads targeting the coveted market sector of young men. And by this point in time, corporations had come to a key realization: that regulatory schemes against which they had fought for decades, meant to label their products as unhealthy, were actually working in their favor. They could stop fighting these labeling schemes, because consumers, especially masculine kids and young adults, would actually be more interested in buying a product if it bore a real, govenrnment-imposed label warning of danger. Studies showed that warning labels on cigarettes, artificial sweeteners, and erectile dysfunction drugs all boosted sales under at least some circumstances. Corporations could position themselves piously as socially-responsible actors who served market imperatives, but dutifully warned consumers that their desires and preferences carried risks, even if that meant they sold fewer products--while secretly doing a happy jig knowing that a government warning would actually increase their sales.

And it's not just in commercial realms where this dynamic is found. For example, in the realms of health and politics, consider what happened during the Covid pandemic. Governments warned that failing to isolate or mask or vaccinate was risky behavior putting peoples' lives in danger. Doctors warned that taking ivermectin was more dangerous than doing nothing to treat cases of Covid. This only increased the commitment of some people to refuse to isolate and/or mask and/or vaccinate, and to seek out ivermectin when they got sick. We tend to focus on the fact that those rejecting public health measures were MAGA Republicans, but they were also disproportionately men. For example, in 2020 and 2021, women in the US wore masks when shopping in stores 150% as often as men out shopping wore them. You find the same dynamic with respect to scientists and academics and government agencies warning about the dangers posed by guns or by tank-sized pickup trucks. The more the risks to self and others are discussed and decried, the more guns and Ford F150s men buy.

As a sociologist, the thing I'd want us to center here is that there's nothing inevitable about any of this. Men are not inherently self-centered, foolish, and antisocial! That's just a learned style of masculinity. And how is it learned? Why, for example, by watching the Lion Bar "Dangerously Better" ad when you yourself are a boy in 2004, viewing a boy in the ad who in turn views a man undergoing zany violence and emerging with the delicious, dangerous prize, as the boy in the ad is reluctantly pulled away by his annoying, repressive, socially responsible, reasonable mother. You absorb from the ad that mothers refusing to buy sons unhealthy Lion Bars is a galling defeat in a cultural battle, which boys can avenge by buying Lion Bars, asserting a masculine lack of care about risks and enjoying the spoils.

Of course, it's just one ad from 2004! But there are so many other commercials and vast swaths of media content sending similar socializing messages.

Anyway: that is what went through my head when I finally tasted a Lion Bar, with its red nutritional-danger-grade warning on the label, and found it just plain nasty, and gave up after two bites.