Sugar Free and Care Free

About a week ago Lindsey told me she'd like to go on a sugar free diet, and asked me to join her.

What 11-year-old asks this? One who overheard me quoting an article (with infographic) about how much sugar Americans eat, around 130 pounds per year. In the Forbes article they stated that The American Heart Association recommends no more than 9.5 teaspoons per day. The average American adult eats 22 teaspoons per day; more disconcerting is that the average American child eats 32 teaspoons per day!  Think about the affect of those 32 teaspoons on little bodies and brains that are a fraction of the size of adults, and you start to understand where our country is heading healthwise, and why ADHD diagnoses are on the rise.

I digress.

As long as Lindsey was not asking out of some misguided idea that she needs to lose weight, I was all for it.

So....what does it mean, to not eat sugar? I mean, sure, I've got a sweet tooth, but a sugar-free diet has to mean more than just skipping dessert, right?

Boy did I get an education.

I learned that you can be as strict or as liberal on a sugar-free diet as you wish. It is naturally occurring in fruits and some vegetables, some dairy and in all leavened breads in some shape or form. The resources I read said to cut out white foods because the point is to cut out foods with a high glycemic index, so no white potatoes, no pasta (unless it's wheat pasta), no white breads, etc.

Oh boy. This is my pasta-loving, white bread sandwich-eating kid. Hmmm....

We made a list of the foods we couldn't eat and those we could, and headed out to the grocery store, where the practical application of our education began.

It took us two hours to get $100 worth of groceries because we spent so much time reading labels. First Lindsey began by looking for sugar in the list of nutrients, but then we realized that naturally occurring sugars are listed there, too. So we started looking for sugar and its relatives in the ingredients list.

Sugar is in EVERYTHING. Holy cow.

All yogurts contained sugar. Ironically the ones that were marketed to kids contained more sugar than the regular yogurts. Now I understand where that 32 teaspoons per day comes in.

We read bread labels until we found a whole wheat one that had an acceptable amount of sugar in it.

We read cracker labels until we found a few with no sugar. (They are quite yummy, too.)

We bought whole wheat pasta and bread.

The cereal aisle proved to be the most daunting. We knew the obvious ones -- we could spot them from a mile away.

19g of sugar per serving. Excludes the milk.

But the healthy ones? All had sugar. The only two we found that met our guidelines were Grape Nuts and Nabisco Shredded Wheat. Luckily Lindsey eats and likes both of those.

Most surprising was when we decided to make tacos one night and were looking through the ingredient list for taco seasoning. We usually buy Ortega taco seasoning, but just to make sure, I read the label.

Sugar.

I start picking out other brands. The only one we found that did not have sugar in it was Old El Paso.

While we were doing this picky sugar-free shopping, the store was packed with ingredients to make baked goods for the holidays. We even picked up chocolate chips because Wayne asked me to make a batch of cookies for him to take in to work the next day. (Which I did and totally did NOT snitch any of the batter OR eat a cookie!)

After reading so many labels to try to avoid sugar, the sight of a pallet of sugar was almost disgusting to us.

And so our journey began. Lindsey asked to do this for two weeks, because she doesn't want to miss out on coffee cake on Christmas morning. I couldn't agree more.

We're nearly a week in. Check back soon for an update on how we're doing after a week of sugar free eating.

When Dramatization Goes Too Far

I've been accused of being a storyteller. I wear that label proudly, thank you.

I like to consider this blog to be my version of storytelling while journaling my children's childhood. Neither of my kids know this site exists;  I suspect that some of my posts will be met with protests from my eldest and most logical of my two children. She would do what many of my friends and family members do when they read my posts, which is correct my facts, informing me that a particular trip I wrote about didn't happen in fall, it was winter, or that I was in 5th grade, not 6th, or what have you.

Others will just laugh at the story and take it for what it was meant to be -- entertaining, but not entirely factual.

That's what I think the best storytellers do -- they build stories around events without boring readers with unnecessary details that would take away from the entertainment. There is a fine line between storytelling and marketing, and in the world of nonprofits, there IS no line between storytelling and marketing. Telling compelling stories is how nonprofits get their audience to feel empathy for their mission and to give.

Recently, I've seen a few examples of storytelling through marketing that have made me raise an eyebrow.

For example, my mom and stepdad have vacationed in a retirement community called The Villages. It is more than just a community, it's a city with its own hospital and zip code. Golf carts are the preferred method of transportation and golf cart traffic jams after town square events are a part of the norm. One of their community centers is filled with black and white old-time photographs of farmers and families, with plaques telling stories about the families who used to live on the land where The Villages is now located. It made my folks feel good, knowing a little bit more about the history of the area before it became developed.

On their second-to-last day of their stay, they picked up a local newspaper that talked about The Villages' plans to expand and the amenities that would be built. One element talked about the planned decor and mentioned that fake families and stories would be created to give the place a history, like had been done the rest of the development.

You mean...you mean that Farmer Johnny, his wife and seven kids didn't really own this land in the 19th century? That warm, fuzzy feeling they had gotten from those stories was gone.

Last week, while munching on a box of fine fast-food cuisine, I began to read the story on the box that the food was in. It's a story about a little boy who used to visit a particular fast food restaurant on a daily basis, and how he became their unofficial mascot. Suddenly he stopped visiting. He finally showed up one day and told the workers that it wasn't as easy for him to get there anymore because someone had stolen his bike. On the other side of the box you read about how all the employees of the restaurant felt so badly that they pooled their money together and bought this little boy a bike, which made the store owner proud. His heart swelled three times its size that day.

The last line is "I just love telling this story." Followed by an asterisk.Which brought me to look for the disclaimer, on the bottom of the box.

The photos are of models, not the actual people in the story. I have no idea if the "dramatization" is a re-writing of an actual story that was related to the marketing staff at headquarters, or if it was generated at a brainstorming session. The fact that I have to question the story at all has my guard up and makes me believe that the story in its entirety was fabricated.

Warm fuzzy feeling? Gone.

Now I'm not accusing either of these companies of doing anything wrong. Neither of them misrepresented their product or services, nor did they have a have a lapse in quality. I give the fast food place kudos for printing an asterisk and a disclaimer, as opposed to The Villages, which allows residents and visitors to think that those stories are true.

I am questioning the storytelling.

If I were a fast food restaurant and was looking for warm, personal stories involving my brand, I would have a contest on my Facebook page eliciting the best story of a visit to a local restaurant from my followers. The stories their own audience members would deliver would probably be better than the one the marketing department created. And guess what: no little asterisk needed. Even better, how about if the asterisk said, "This is a summary of a story told to us by one of our Facebook followers and long-time customers. Like us on Facebook to read the original story and share your own."

I don't know what to tell The Villages except that when the fabrications are discovered by their audience, the emotions they were trying to create with those stories is immediately gone, replaced with a feeling of having been deceived. It's not a good feeling, let me tell you. I wouldn't recommend it.

When consumer trust is hard to earn and corporate missteps are immediately spread wide and far through social media, my advice to companies and nonprofits alike is to be on the up-and-up. Be a storyteller, yes, a fabricator, no.

*I remind readers that posts are a reflection of my personal opinions and do not reflect that of my employer or anyone else for that matter.

Metropolitan Consumers

Wayne and I recently bought a Sleep Number bed. Our old mattress was aging and we wanted to get a king if possible. Of course, with our old house with its 90-degree turn at both the bottom and the top of the staircase, we knew that getting a "normal" king-sized mattress into our bedroom was an impossibility. So we looked at the Sleep Number bed, as the bed arrives in pieces and is assembled in the bedroom.

We kid you not, that was a deciding factor in looking at a Sleep Number bed.

While the girls were away at birthday parties one Saturday afternoon, we had a couple of hours to ourselves so we drove to the nearest Sleep Number store, about 2 miles from our house. We shopped, tried different beds, talked about whether or not we wanted to make this investment, and ultimately signed on the dotted line. A week and a half later a crew of two guys showed up at our house, hauled away our old mattress and assembled the bed for us. By that evening we had a brand new bed for us, and a new "toy" for the girls, who thought that having a remote for a bed was DA BOMB.

The girls putting our new bed to use.

I was talking to my dad about our latest purchase, and he was slightly envious. "We used to have a Sleep Number store in Jonesboro," he said wistfully. That's the closest big city to them, about 25 miles away. There would be no way they would get a bed delivered and set up at their home by Select Comfort employees anytime soon with no store location near them now.

My mom said their customer service stunk, which is why they didn't buy one. She and my step dad drove to Green Bay, WI to shop for a bed, and found out that they do not live in the delivery area. The store would have shipped them the bed in pieces for them to assemble themselves. If they weren't happy with it they could break it back down, put it back into the original boxes (yeah right) and ship it back within 30 days for a full refund. She figured they would lose a week on both ends of that equation just to put the damn bed up, so they never bought one.

I wouldn't say that Select Comfort has poor customer service, I would say that my mom lives too far away from the store to get customer service.

My niece who lives in California was in her hometown of Tracy, Minnesota, visiting over the holidays. She wanted to make a salad and went to the grocery store with her mom to get the ingredients.

"I can't find the cucumbers," she called to her mom as she was looking over the produce department.

"Cucumbers are out of season," her mom calls back, "They don't carry them this time of year." My niece looked at her mom like she was from Mars.

Recently I had an exchange with a high school classmate of mine who sent me a recipe for an Irish soda bread. He recommended using Red Mill flour in this particular recipe, so I went to the store to buy some. I snapped this picture, sent it back to him and wrote, "Which kind?"

Wheat flour? Whole wheat flour? Semolina flour? Soy flour? Oat flour?

These are ALL Red Mill brands of flour. Crazy.

 He assumed I was at a specialty store; I was at my local grocery store. And apparently the answer was "Red Mill Organic Unbleached White Flour," which wasn't even in the section I was looking in, because it is so "plain."

We take this level of access to choices for granted.

Want to buy an expensive bottle of wine for a special occasion? We've got 3 wine stores near us to choose from, which one did you want to try first?

Did you want to go to a restaurant that only serves vegetarian food from Ethiopia? It's called "Blue Nile," and I drive by it on the way home from work. Or you could have your pick from any one of over a thousand  restaurants in the area, serving cuisine from every corner of the globe.

From clothing to household goods to food, we are lucky. Not only can we afford these purchases (which I am grateful for every day), but we have easy access to these goods and services living where we live.

I'm Honored...Not Really...

One day this past week a catalog for Melly's plopped in our mailbox. And I can say "plop" -- the thing was probably 2 feet high by a foot wide. I had to have Lindsey hold it so you could get an idea of the scale of this thing.

What a huge catalog!

From a creative perspective, I can say that they did a great job of getting my attention. It's big, colorful and beautiful. But from a direct marketing perspective, they were way off.

There is a Melly's store in the Galleria, an upscale shopping center down France Ave. I am practically within walking distance of the store which I have absolutely no plans of visiting anytime soon.

$288 for a shirt. $468 for a dress. A strapless, summer garden dress that I have no place to go wearing it. $598 for shoes. Shoes, people. Those things that I scuff on the sidewalk the first time I wear them. If I ever spent that kind of money on a pair of shoes I would put them behind glass and make everyone who walked into my house gaze at them like a piece of fricking art.

Lindsey's "Really?!" look. Get used to it, she'll perfect it by her teen years.

I can only imagine that the company was talked into doing a "zip saturation" mailing, where you mail to all households in certain zip codes around your locations, assuming that everyone who lives in those zip codes has the demographics you're looking for in potential buyers.

I'm going to take a stab at Melly's target customer, based on what I remember of the catalog world.

90% women.
Average household income $250,000+
Age range 35-55.
Spends $200/mo on beauty/spa products.
Average order size $350.

This is so not me.

So thanks, I'm honored...kind of. I'm glad you think that I would value your products, but I don't. And I'm pretty sure my 83-year-old widow neighbor down the street who bought her house for $30,000 in 1955 doesn't value your products, either.

Nice try.