The Marketing Of Air

Marketing…who really needs another blog post on that…ugh! Don’t we clutter the web enough with regurgitated content? Well…I’ve got one more post to add to the mix and this one holds about as much weight as the clutter because it talks about nothing but AIR. Air is a powerful force in marketing, and after buying a bag of Lays with 5 or 6 chips in it, I decided to figure out just how powerful a tool air is. With a tape measure, the calculator on my phone, some funny looks in the grocery store and an air extraction technique perfected by Vu Dang, I set out to establish an Air Inflation Rating (A.I.R.) and gather other data that explains the power of air.

My first product – the classic Wonder Bread. All 20 slices of bread stuffed into one 8oz measuring cup and the data that came of it:

Leaving the store with my loaf of bread, I was carrying 92% air!  It get’s better though…take a look at the all natural PopChips. With so much air in these, the ‘all natural’ statement definitely lives up to its claim…I mean, how do you get more natural than air anyway?

PopChips came away with the highest A.I.R. number. That means PopChips contain more air than all the other products, relative to its original size (equaling 94% air!) . I thought Keebler’s ice cream cones/cups would give the chips a run for their money, but it wasn’t even close.

The final product I looked at – Kellogg’s Corn Pops dropped the ball when it came to air power, but I suppose that’s a good thing for consumers as they are not paying as much for air in this case. Still, over two-thirds of your money evaporates into good old oxygen when you buy a box of these.

In conclusion, I paid $14.89 for the 4 products, and a staggering 86% of my spend went to air! Another interesting observation…if I replaced all the air used to shelve a bag of PopChips with solid chip matter, that bag of chips would cost 35 times that of crude oil at the same volume (oil calculated at $100 a barrel), so you might want to think about buying something a little more ‘solid’ if you’re looking to make your money go further…especially in this economy.

With weightless numbers like these, air should be an active ingredient on food labels. Will it happen…most likely not, but if it does I can already see the marketing spin machine putting ‘high heels on a goldfish’ and offering organic air as the next ‘need to have’. It might seem a little far fetched, but given the above data I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the next step in air’s storied evolution.

Lāt-air,
eric