The lead story in the Specialty Foods newsletter today really caught my eye. “Some 52% of consumers are monitoring the amount of sodium in their dietsand 26% read labels for sodium.” This seems simply incredible on the face of it, especially in the context of my new home in upstate New York where 77.8% of the populace pays no attention whatsoever to what goes into their gullet.
22% [of consumers] restrict the amount of salt that they add to food, but don’t watch the much greater amount of sodium that is in foods and beverages
18% say that “food and beverages low in sodium are one of the three most important components of a healthy diet”
26% read labels for sodium, and may make some decisions based on this info, but they are not following a regimen to control sodium in their diet
34% do not pay attention to sodium
Except for the last stat (which seems low), none of these numbers seems at all credible to me on a seat-of-the-pants basis. Do they to you? Perhaps this is some research from a survey that is skewed to make a particular marketing point? So let’s look at the original source material, the verbatim comments from the survey. Oops, they aren’t available. Instead Mintel offers a link to a webinar where we can learn about “Sodium: The Next Trans Fat?”
High school debaters learn that with a little digging, they can find a “statistic” to support any point of view. Perhaps in the Mintel survey, and I’m stipulating that there was one, they asked people “do you ever think about the amount of sodium in your diet?” and 52% said yes. That would still be a high number, but I’d accept it. Then maybe some creative marcom copywriter changed it to “monitor” which recasts the same stat as alarming or fascinating news.
One of my earliest bosses promised he was going to teach me to “lie with statistics”. I didn’t last very long at that position and don’t know what happened to that boss. Hmm…
U-Haul's moving billboards, deployed nationwide by willing customers.
I recently completed a pretty intense cross-country move. I rented a 24 foot Budget truck (that’s the size of the box, not counting the cab) and when it still wasn’t big enough I shipped an extra container of stuff with Door To Door Movers.
I was amazed at the price differential. The Budget truck cost half what I was quoted by U-Haul. And on a square foot basis Door to Door was 60% of the price of a competitor, Pods.com.
How come the disparity? I don’t know enough about the pods type containers to have a strong opinion, but when it comes to trucks it’s definitely MARKETING. Every U-Haul truck or trailer on the road is emblazoned with ads about how easy it is to load, to drive, etc. If I’m thinking about a move, I sure am going to notice those free ads… being driven down the road by customers like me. And sure, I’ll check U-Haul first. But I assume most consumers go no further, or they couldn’t charge this kind of premium.
As a mover, I’m glad I took the extra time to find the low priced spread. But as a marketer, I’m pleased to recognize advertising that seems to be working so well.
Have you ever watched a janitor replacing fluorescent light bulbs? They change all of them, whether or not they are burned out. The opportunity cost of climbing up on that ladder is high enough that it outweighs the time remaining in the still-working bulbs (which is probably short since they were replaced en masse last time).
I need new rawhide laces on my Googie lamp shade.
I thought about this when I rediscovered my Googie side lamps from the 50s which had been stuck in the attic during a remodel. Soon after I acquired these, the rawhide laces in the shades were starting to fray so I went to Mendel’s in the Haight and got replacement laces. Foolishly, I replaced only the laces that had broken. Now the rest of the laces are shot and I have no idea where the rawhide went, so I’ll have to buy more and this time I’ll be smart enough to replace everything.
A parallel lesson comes from Keith Campbell, who was my client and president of the Federated Group of home entertainment stores back in the day. Keith never went to college but he knew that when he found something wrong in a store–say, a sloppy warehouse of A/V equipment that makes it difficult to find what a customer wants–it is typical of a larger problem. A manager wouldn’t be careless about that and careful about everything else. The whole system needs to be taken apart and examined.
Think about things as a system, not a series of one-off events. You may discover some problems… or, opportunities… in your own marketing.
Early in my career, I was lured to advertising’s “dark side”. I stopped in to see a department store client and was told that, while there were presently no freelance copy assignments, the direct marketing manager had just quit and I was welcome to apply for the job. Thus began a five year journey that culminated in a position as account supervisor at a national agency before I ran screaming into the sunlight on Wilshire Blvd. and ceremonially buried my suit in my back yard.
Creative colleagues kid me about my poor judgment (in taking the job, not losing the suit) to this day. But this experience actually provided valuable lessons that have sustained me throughout my freelance career.
The first lesson was the relationship between what I wrote and the financial success of the company. Previously, I’d written more or less for my own amusement and maybe to impress the girls in the office. My perspective changed when my boss at Broadway Department Stores, Marketing VP Jan Wetzel, took me for a store tour on the first day of a big sale so I could see people lined up to products which up to now had been copyblocks and production art. Now, I realized they were buying at least in part because of the creative presentation.
My learning was reinforced when I later had a job as ad director at a company that sold tools on the phone; prospects called an 800 number in response to a mailer I would send out. When there was an excess of incoming calls, they would overflow to the receptionist at the front desk. I soon learned that when she was too busy to say good morning, we had a successful mailer on our hands. Aha, creative presentation makes a marketing difference (along with some list testing I got to play with)!
Another lesson was a corollary of this one. I discovered, because the creatives now working for me did not always do it, how important it was to honor schedule and budget commitments and to treat the “suits” with mutual courtesy. I can still see a TV art director at a large Detroit-based agency looking me in the eye and explaining away a mediocre script for a :30 retail supermarket spot because “Otis, there are only so many good ideas.” And when I returned to the creative side I initially found it hard to find work because creative directors figured if I had done account work, my writing couldn’t possibly be any good.
Pay attention to P&L. Honor schedules and budgets. Treat your client with respect. This is stuff they don’t teach in cub copywriter school. I’m glad I have the opportunity to learn it.
A good writer quickly learns the importance of developing a voice for his or her writing. Readers get more involved when they feel like a real person is writing to them. And over time you know what that voice is for a particular genre or publication and you fall into it like an actor playing a familiar part.
The author of otisregrets, for example, is somewhat professorial, a bit stuffy, yet tries hard to be approachable and takes extra care to explain what he means if it’s not immediately clear. While Otis M writing on Yelp is very different. That author is about 10 years younger and something of a wise guy. He uses catch phrases and occasional puns and enjoys going off on tangents in his reviews.
I know both these writers well and so do my readers. These voices haven’t always been there, as you can see from reading some early posts in either forum. I didn’t set out to be that person, but rather evolved into it over time.
All of which is my preamble to a theory on why I haven’t developed a habit of Tweeting frequently: I can’t find a way to develop a voice in 140 characters (which I try to keep to 120 for retweetability). By the time I say the bare minimum I have to say, I’m close to the limit.
After I realized this I started looking at other people’s tweets to see who had a voice I can recognize. @the_real_shaq has a voice, but he’s one of a kind. (Shaq’s eulogy for former NFL quarterback Steve McNair, who was shot to death yesterday: “Rip steve mcnair Roo roo q dog”) @broylesa has a voice, but she is nearly always writing about food in the Austin area… maybe very specific subject matter is a key.
Everyone else in my tweetstream is sticking to the facts, unless it’s personal. Here’s @heatheranne who works in advertising which is probably why we follow each other: “Trying to get glass out of my now-jammed garbarator. Oh my…” Now that is good writing, a vivid word picture plus a made up word and comment that makes you feel what she is feeling. I am going to go for adjectives and a personal aside next time I tweet and see what happens.
My venerable MacBook died today. (No condolences necessary, it wasn’t Black.*) Which brings to mind the issue of how freelancers should deal with technical glitches when talking to clients.
Should I have called my clients and said “my computer died, so I won’t be able to read any emails you send me till I get a new one”? Um, no. I have webmail for my email so I can check it from any public computer with web access by going to http://webmail.otismaxwell.com . Halfway through 2009, not being able to exchange email with your clients is simply not OK.
Should I have warned those same clients that “since I’ll have to check email on my iPhone till I get a new computer, I won’t be able to download your attachments like the marked up deck or PDF”? Unless they have iPhones themselves, your clients will think this excuse is ridiculous which actually it is. (Steve, are you listening?)
This is why you need a backup account on gmail or yahoo. If you can’t get attachments at your primary email, ask them to forward to your alternate. Awkward, but better than blowing a deadline… or losing a client.
* With the new generation of Mac laptops we seem to have bid farewell to the Black Mac, a laptop which cost $300 more primarily because it had a matte black finish. I only know one person who bought one, a consultant to publishers in South America. He called on a VIP who said, “S__, you say you respect me yet you show up with a white MacBook!” The next visit, S__ had a black one.
It appears that the purveyors of fancy foods, and the consumers who buy from them, are ready to lead us back to fiscal health. The Javits Convention Center, which two weeks ago was so deserted you could picture yourself getting mugged during DM Days, was today so packed it was hard to make it down the aisles. Both exhibitors and attendees were delighted.
Miami's chocolate sushi rolls are made from dried fruit (standing in for the fishy parts), wrapped in rice crispies, then dipped in chocolate.
There’s always a big trend that emerges at the Fancy Food Show and this year it was, as one possibly might have guessed, fancy chocolate…. the stuff that soothes us and feels like an acceptable treat when life is hard. There was single origin chocolate (lots and lots of that), high end chocolate with handsome packaging, chocolate to eat with wine, even chocolate sushi. Runner up trend: tea, in both liquid and dried forms. Also the broad category of things you can make at home that feel like currently unaffordable restaurant meals: pasta sauces from Rao’s or Mario Batalli, premade soufflés guaranteed not to fall, spice kits with a recipe card etc.
Trending down: celebrities
Flavored water is still a strong category, while celebrity foods, energy drinks, artisanal salts, salsas and specialty vinegars—each a trend at one point—were hard to find at the show. Most surprisingly pervasive single item: sun dried tomatoes. Most popular booths among attendees on a New York summer day: anything serving iced desserts, or slicing prosciutto or Serrano ham.
You too can have marketing which is meaning-based.
Maybe you are making no attempt to put any meaning into your marketing today. Or perhaps it has not occurred to you that you should be “understanding — not merely tracking — all forms of customer interactions to deliver online experiences that are more relevant, engaging and profitable than ever.” If so, this free event is for you. And you even get a steak dinner out of it!
Yes, that’s the sound of my tongue in my cheek. This is funny but it’s not. As hard as times are, it’s hard to imagine how somebody could choose as their “light bulb” moment that maybe marketers have not had it occur to them to make sense of their advertising.
By the way, the link is clickable to the real invitation.
After the writeup on Texas barbecue, several folks asked if I would repost my original brisket recipe as text, not an image, for easier reading. Here you go. I’ve added a few thoughts on technique, in italics. This recipe came to me in a package of materials purchased through some kind of multilevel marketing exchange back in the 80s. You would pay the sender $1 for the packet and then send it on to 10 new people, each of whom would send $1 to you. For whatever reason, this did not make me rich, but the recipe is worth all of $1 and more.
5 Easy Steps to Delicious Brisket
(8 to 10 lb. Brisket)
1. First – Rub salt, pepper and brown sugar on both sides of brisket. Leave the fat side up thru entire cooking time. Unlike some, I recommend lightly trimming away the fat while still leaving a good layer over the meat. If you don’t trim at all you are going to end up with a lot of tasty smoked fat.
2. Second – Put on smoker “fat side up”. Remember not open flame, just hot fire with smoke. Charcoal broquett is fine. Smoking is cooking with indirect heat, in which the fire is in another part of the grill and the smoke and heat are drawn across the food by the way you manage your airflow. The good smoky flavor is going to come from chunks of hickory or oak (I find mesquite and apple too light in flavor) that you will soak for 30 minutes or more before adding to the fire. Also, you need a source of moisture, such as a pan of water inside the cooking vessel, to humidify the cooking atmosphere and concentrate the flavor.
3. Third- Leave on smoker for 3 hours checking fire every 45 minutes so bottom of brisket won’t burn. During this time you should be steadily replenishing the charcoal and wood chunks for a constant smoky fire. I like to leave the smoke vents open at the beginning to build up a good fire, then shut them completely to grab all that sweet smoke, then open them a little just before the fire is about to go out and leave that way for duration of cooking.
4. Fourth- To finish for perfect tenderness wrap in foil, put in loaf pan, and finish in the oven at 325 degrees for 2 to 3 hours. The last hour of cooking in oven, test by sticking a fork in brisket at both thick part and thin part. When fork goes in easily without force it’s done.
5. Fifth – Unwrap; let cool slightly before slicing. Remember: Never put B.B.Q. Sauce on brisket while cooking. The smoke gives the flavor and the oven gives great tenderness.
Brisket with perfect smoke ring from Snow’s BBQ, Lexington, Texas.
It isn’t hard to make good brisket. (Brisket = barbecue, at least for the purposes of this article.) You need a reasonably fatty piece of meat, USDA Choice or higher. You need a rub containing brown sugar for a nice crispy crust. You need a smoker with a good tight seal to keep the smoke in while letting air circulate so the fire won’t go out. You need moisture, in the form of well soaked wood or chips and a steaming pan inside the cooker. And most of all you need patience. Have all those elements at the ready and you can look forward to a tender and tasty piece of meat several hours hence, whether you use a massive smoker and aged hickory logs or a backyard kettle with chips on top of charcoal.
It is, however, hard to make great brisket. And that is why Texans of all ages and social perspectives travel considerable distances to taste the best that can be had. On a recent trip to South by Southwest I found myself on such a journey, repeating some of the same itinerary as when I coming down from Dallas in my college days not a few years ago.
Original dining hall at Smitty’s BBQ, Lockhart, Texas.
First stop is Lockhart, 30 miles south of Austin by a fast country highway. This is the home of Smitty’s and Kreuz’, two establishments with near-identical menus and customs. The tale is that the owner of Kreuz died and had a son and a daughter, and he left the business name to the son and the original smokehouse and market to his daughter.
For a proper Smitty’s experience you need to go in from the original entrance on a sidestreet, not the big parking lot next to the highway. You will pass through a long dark hall lined with hard wooden counters and benches. When I was young these walls had big dull knives hanging on chains. You would buy your meat by the pound, bring it to the counter, and hack it with a knife to your liking. I assumed somebody came along and wiped the knives clean at the end of the day. Even so they would not pass today’s health regulations and today the hallway exists only as a relic.
From this you emerge into the pit room, a dark smoky atrium which probably should be visited in summer heat for a properly hellish atmosphere. You will gingerly step past an open fire to get to the counter. In the background a butcher is prepping meats on a butcher block and a counter person will scoop up your order for “hot rounds” (sausages tied together at the end), brisket and ribs by the pound.
You’ll also get a few slices of white bread in case you want to make a sandwich, or crackers if you prefer. The counter person weighs your food and delivers it on a large piece of butcher paper atop a smaller piece of butcher paper (this is your plate) and you carry this into a big dining hall where you can buy sides and soda or beer. There’s sauce on the tables, not the sugary abhorrent “BBQ sauce” found in supermarkets but a thin red mixture that’s like a mild Tabasco.
I always take my first bite neat, no sauce. I am looking for a smoky dryness, an intense flavor of beef combined with the effect of long smoking. Even though brisket is a fatty cut, it has gone through hours of cooking and lost much of its original weight and the first taste and mouth feel should not be fat, pleasurable though that may be. And I don’t want chewy meat. Fall-apart tenderness is a plus, but not mandatory; what is essential is that the texture of the brisket should not distract from the taste.
My meal was a rib, 1/4 pound of brisket and a hot round. The rib was tender but the brisket wasn’t, and it had a row of fat across the top. (Even though brisket is sold as “fat meat”, a thoughtful butcher will trim off this layer before weighing.) And not a lot of smoky flavor. I’m not a sausage person, but the hot round was pleasant, a coarse grind of beef and pork with pepper flecks mixed in and (I think) a bit of grain for density. A side of cole slaw was forgettable.
Identical sausage twins in Lockhart, Texas. Kreuz is on the left (I think.)
Next stop is Kreuz’s which needs less description because everything is pretty much the same as Smitty’s except that the building and the smoke pit room are recently built. But you’ll find the same meats and the same procedures, down to the pair of straight-edged spatulas the server uses to scrape the meat from the butcher block onto the serving paper.
I can’t do a straight up comparison, however, because Kreuz’s was out of brisket! That’s right, they’d sold the last of it shortly before my arrival and no more would be ready for a while. So I had to settle for a slice of “lean”, or barbecued shoulder. It was surprisingly tender for “lean” and tasted fine on a sandwich. The rib was suspiciously light in color but had the smokiest flavor of anything so far. The sausage was fine and tasted a lot like Smitty’s—which isn’t surprising because they apparently come from the same source (see photo).
If you’re headed to Lockhart I’ll send you to Smitty’s, I think. The food is marginally better at Kreutz’ but not enough to make up for the atmosphere at Smitty’s. Still, neither one will give you the best barbecue I’ve had in Texas. For that you have to wait until Saturday and journey a little farther, in a different direction, to Snow’s in the tiny and out of the way town of Lexington.
Snow’s caused a stir in winter 2009 because it was named over the Lockhart twins as the best barbecue in Texas by Texas Monthly, and soon after that the lines were out the door on Main Street and the barbecue was selling out by 10 am. It’s a tribute that the folks at Snow’s (who have other jobs and only smoke for the weekends because traditionally that is when the ranchers brought their cattle to auction) kept their good humor and quality and perspective through it all. Now (4 months after the article) the lines are down to a manageable size again.
What makes Snow’s the best? First, the brisket is sublime. Mine had a perfect smoke ring… pink around the edges of the meat and also pink inside along a layer of fat separating two layers of muscle. (Brisket is the “chest” of the animal, in the very front between the two front legs where a number of muscles come together in a criss-cross arrangement.) And not only was it fork-tender, it fell apart at the first touch of the fork.
Ribs were at least as good as Kreuz. (You may have guessed that pork ribs aren’t really my thing. If made from a commercial pig, they have a pleasant and not very complex flavor and you really can’t go wrong so long as the excess fat is cooked away.) And the sausage was crackling with goodness, cooked until the interior fat was boiled through the skin leaving it crispy and the interior hollow in spots.
Aside from the meat, what makes Snow’s special is that they are good marketers of what they sell. And this is important. It is one thing to bite into a perfect apple in a farmer’s market, something else to dine in a restaurant where a good chef has taken the trouble to ensure that everything is coordinated for a satisfying experience. Snow’s does this where the other establishments don’t.
You can get a plate with sides (solid Texas renditions of mustardy potato salad and vinegary slaw). You can have endless, very good, smoky pinto beans at no extra charge. You can take it outside and dine on picnic tables surrounded by barbecue pits and assorted rolling smokers which I assume are used to cater events in other locations. And you can even get it mail order since they’ve discovered if you smoke once a weekend you might as well smoke again (on Saturday, while the counter is open) and freeze that meat and send it around the country.
But Snow’s does have a weakness and it is their sauce, a sour blend informed by the insidious Carolina influence which has spread across Texas in recent years like Johnson grass. (Thank goodness there is no “pulled pork” at Snow’s.) . Do not under any circumstances put it on your food until you have tasted the meat naked, followed by a trial squirt of the excellent Cajun Chef hot sauce on the table. This should be all you need, especially because Snow’s meat tends toward the salty side and the hot sauce acts as a corrective.
It’s nice to know that the best barbecue store in Texas still has room for improvement. I will be back.
