Picture the Fling Chocolate Website
Ladies everywhere: Throw away your Hershey’s, Snickers, and whatever else you’re into these days, and make room for a Fling. I know this sounds preposterous and risqué, but that’s what the good people at Mars want you to do. The Fling is the first new candy bar from Mars in 20 years. And it only has 85 calories!
Eighty-five seems to be the magic number these days. According to presentations at the fifth annual Marketing to Women Conference held by Frito-Lay, Motorola, and Glam Media, among others, women account for 85 percent of all consumer purchases in everything from autos to health care.
Consequently, Mars is trying to target this market in what looks to me like a four-step process.
Step One: Create a tantalizing and racy slogan. The promotional postcard reads “Pleasure Yourself,” and even better is the tagline Mars is using: “Naughty but not that naughty.”
Step Two: Appeal to female dietary needs. Fling’s serving size is the recommended daily allowance of “two fingers.”
Step Three: Create innovative ingredients. From the pictures it looks like a Twix bar and a Milky Way had a baby that was only 85 calories. But when I researched the contents, I learned that the Fling has a pink shimmer, thanks to the mineral mica (FDA-approved, of course).
Step Four: Seal the deal. Be on the lookout for commercials that simulate strangers having sex in a dressing room. But don’t worry, they’re not.
Want to try a Fling yourself? Don’t worry, while the candy bar is currently only sold in California stores, you can order one online to fulfill your cravings for a Fling!
While Mars is attempting to capitalize on the female market in questionable ways, it is not the only company that uses sexist marketing strategies. Let’s take the new Pepsi Max commercial as an example. If you haven’t seen their newest Pepsi Max ad, it consists of a bunch of men getting hit by their friends accidentally (like with a golf club or with a bowling ball) and then saying, “I’m good.” At the end the movie commercial voice comes on and says, “Men can take anything except the taste of diet soda. Until now. Pepsi Max, the first diet cola for men!”
So, I know what you’re wondering: When did these products stop being about taste or quality and start becoming a battle of the sexes? Easy. Someone in the not-so-distant past once said that bad publicity is better than no publicity, and the fact that women and men alike are up in arms about this marketing strategy probably only makes Mars that much more money. In the age of viral videos and the blogosphere, it looks like Mars might have hit on a gold mine — or perhaps on the splendors of Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory.
What really bugs me, aside from the obvious, is that marketers still haven’t learned that throwing in some pink, using pretty lettering, and cutting back on calories or making a product simpler to use does not make women more interested in purchasing it. What woman really thinks that mixing sensuality or sexual innuendos with chocolate would be the perfect marketing ploy? What can I say? It’s a sad day for Mars lovers everywhere.
From jezebel.com:
This is just as frustrating as the 100 calorie snack commercials where the cartoon women run laps to burn off eating one potato chip. There is nothing healthy about the message these products and their marketing are sending women.
This is so pathetic. But sex does sell. I’ve seen that “I’m good” commercial, it’s just dumb and insulting to men and women. Women seem to get gratification from shampoos and all sorts of things according to advertisers.
It reminds me of a commercial that I saw the other day while watching TV with my seven year old daughter. It showed women dropping what they were doing, runnning out into the street, jumping into cars, leaving the salon with curlers in their hair, etc.–really in a frenzy. Why? because somebody was having a carpet sale.
And you know how excited and frothing at the mouth we get about a sale!
My daughter thought it was silly.