International Delight

Here are today's ads, brought to you by International Delight.

This first one doesn't exist on the web, so I resorted to sitting in front of the TV and trying to record it with my cell phone. The sound and picture quality are Bad. Hopefully, you've seen it before. If not, here's a quick transcript of the dialogue.

We thought the only way to get creamy coffeehouse drinks at home was to hire a live-in barista to make them with real milk and cream!
[barista making horrible sounds]
Thankfully, International Delight introduced new Breve Cream, made with real milk and cream!
Don't make room for the barista, make room for the breve!





I mentioned last week that I am a coffee snob. I've accepted this fact. And thanks to my snobbiness, I am severely irritated by the many, many factual errors in these commercials. Please don't be bored by a quick list thereof:

- Baristas don't make that noise unless they're doing it wrong. That squealing means they're scalding the milk. Good baristas don't scald milk.
- Breve is the Italian word for heavy cream, so saying "breve cream" is redundant.
- A caramel macchiato is made of espresso, vanilla, milk, and caramel. Macchiato, Italian for "marked," means the shot is poured on top the foamy vanilla-flavored steamed milk, marking the milk with deep dark espresso. Then the drink is marked further with caramel on top of the foam. In other words, a caramel macchiato is not black coffee with flavored creamer.
- Similarly, a vanilla latte involves espresso, vanilla, and milk, not black coffee with flavored creamer.
- Likewise, a white chocolate mocha involves espresso, white chocolate, and milk, not black coffee with flavored creamer.

I can accept flavored creamers being inspired by "coffeehouse" espresso drinks, but that smug little man in a green, non-Starbucks apron pretending that he made a caramel macchiato for his sweetie makes me a little sick.

Okay, I'm done whining, and I swear this is relevant. Remember last week's entry about the Tassimo Brewbot? International Delight is also trying to bridge the gap between black coffee and snobby Starbucksers. Admittedly, its target audience is less sophisticated, unattached to the luxury of foamed milk.

And yet International Delight uses the snobby words. Breve, caramel macchiato – the terms are used incorrectly, but they sure sound fancy, don't they?

International Delight is capitalizing on the ignorance of its customer base. (And I don't say ignorance as a criticism, only a simple and innocent lack of knowledge on the snobby-coffee subject.) Because International Delight's customers are not aware of or annoyed by the fact that the drinks shown in the commercials are not coffeehouse drinks, they believe these creamers mixed with black coffee are just as good, even though they're barely related. They may also be tasty, but it's nowhere near the same taste.

And companies do this all the time. In fact, many sales are exploitations of customer ignorance. Commercials can either trick customers or educate them. Some commercials that trick consumers include these International Delight ads, as well as the Heat Surge Amish Fireplace ads I covered a few entries ago.

Want to see a commercial that educates customers? Stay tuned for a clever ad from Dunwoody College.