Now: 80% More Bold!

A few days ago I was walking through Walgreen’s Drug Store before work because I wanted to get a pack of gum. I went through the extreme candy aisle they have and came across the gum section. However, their gum was no ordinary gum, it was ‘flavor blasted’ with ‘80% more boldness’! Wow.

I wondered, how could anyone add 80% more boldness to something? How exactly does one determine the increase of boldness in gum? It is interesting how marketers use quantitative statements to evaluate qualitative items, such as ‘more boldness’ being correlated to an exact number. I, as a marketing/management student, think this is a good marketing technique because if one package says ‘GUM’ and one package says ‘BOLDEST GUM ON THE MARKET’, probably someone would go for the more tasty and bad breath reducing gum. But I wanted to see if the gum was ACTUALLY bolder according to ingredients.

I went onto the Wrigley’s website (www.wrigley.com) to see what gum was made of and how it could be altered to be more bold. They basically had a lot of fluff in between their description of gum’s different elements, but from what I gathered they use the “finest grades of pure, powdered cane and beet sugar” to sweeten the gum, “fresh garden spearmint plants grown on farms in the United States” to flavor mint gums and as for their other gums, such as Big Red, they use “a variety of fruit and spice essences”. So I suppose they could be using more of their fine mint of spice essences, but there was nothing on the website that helped lead me in the direction of a conclusion, which makes me think if there is any veracity behind their ‘80% more bold’ statement. In the beginning of this class Mr. Topoleski wanted us to observe the media using altered statistics to influence us, and I think this ‘bolder’ gum is a perfect example.