Real Ingredients or Real Bull?

Marketers often have to come up with creative ways to gain a competitive advantage and sell T.S.O.C.—the same old crap. This requires repackaging common ingredients and giving them new (and newly trademarked) names and identities. Are they insulting our intelligence with their duplicity or does this type of marketing really work? If you’ve purchased the following products, you may have to side with the latter.

Bifidus Regularis and Bifidus Immunis
Probiotics are the new the cure-all craze. If you believe some food labels, they can solve everything from bad digestion to acne to obesity to a bad attitude. To help further their health claims, the marketing team at Dannon, which makes Activia, took things a step further. Banking on the power of suggestion, they came up with new names for two strains of bacteria found in their yogurt: bifidus regularis, which supposedly helps regulate your digestive system and L. casei immunitas, which, you guessed it, supposedly strengthens your immune system. Probiotics may have some benefits, but most yogurts contain them—the reason why there is a class action lawsuit accusing Dannon of a false advertising campaign promoting the benefits of their yogurt over others. The suit charges that the claims merely convince consumers to pay more. But how else would the marketing team get paid?

Certs—with Retsyn®
With all the fuss Certs made about its fabulously unique ingredient—Retsyn—which none of the other lowly breath mints contain, one would assume it was damn worth it. But alas, a few investigative clicks yields an ingredient list for Retsyn that is less spectacular and more mundane: copper gluconate (the green specks), hydrogenated cottonseed oil, and flavoring. There is no such chemical as Retsyn—it’s a mere conglomerate of every day ingredients.

Scope—with T25®
Scope is the only mouthwash that contains T25 breath fresheners. What, exactly, does this mean? The ambiguous letter/number ingredient would make one assume that it’s a highly sophisticated chemical that rids you of your lingering halitosis for good. But, reading the ingredient list reveals that T25 is a piece of made-up marketing—there is no new compound, merely a trademarked blend of breath fresheners. A bit like pushing the peas around on the plate to make it seem like something new has happened.

Quadratein™—sounds serious, huh?
It’s not hard to figure out why the makers of Snickers Marathon Bar named their proprietary blend of non-proprietary ingredients “Quadratein.” The word calls to mind those big leg muscles needed to run 26.2 miles, or the protein building blocks of those muscles. However, there is nothing unique about their trademarked compound—it’s simply a mix of protein found in milk and soy, mixed with some peanut flour—nothin’ new there. Their real marketing “genius,” however, came with the introduction of the oxymoronic “low-carb” marathon bar—a true feat of duplicity. Has anyone at Snicker’s ever run a marathon? You need those carbs!