Introduction
Two faced gold chocolate is a beautiful chocolate bar which has been made from two different types of chocolate, each with a different colour. The colours are brown and white. The brown chocolate has a browner colour, but the white chocolate has a whiter colour. When you eat the brown chocolate, you get a browner taste, but when you eat the white chocolate, you get a whiter taste.
That’s an interesting marketing strategy…
Chocolate and the Brain
It’s easy to get confused with chocolate when we indulge in it. Just take a look at any of the offerings from Nestle, Cadbury or Hershey and you’ll quickly see why:
1) Chocolate (which is what we are talking about here) is not “two faced gold”, it is simply a chocolate product.
2) Chocolate can be made in multiple ways. The sweet taste of chocolate can be enhanced by adding sugar, but the sugar doesn’t have to come from sugar cane or sugar beet; it can also come from other sources such as corn syrup and fructose.
3) It is not true that we only need to add a small amount of fat to increase the taste (this is just not true). There are many different types of fat and they all have different effects on flavour.
4) It can be made in many shapes and sizes, including long bars which stretch over several inches and which are quite bitter tasting once you start eating them (and there are some great examples of this!).
5) The shape isn’t the most important thing – it can present a lot of problems depending on how you store it too.
The Role of Serotonin
Serotonin is one of the main neurotransmitters in the brain (along with dopamine, norepinephrine and histamine), and it’s responsible for motivation, pleasure, reward and other aspects of human behavior. It can be produced in response to good things, like food and sex — but it can also be produced by bad things (like pain).
Serotonin is what’s known as an “illusion neurotransmitter”: it exists in the brain but doesn’t have a specific function. It serves as a “matchmaker” between two neurotransmitters: one that influences our desire to obtain something, and another that dictates how we perceive reality. What I mean by this is that serotonin tells us where we should be going (motivation) and where we should be standing (perception).
So what could happen if you take away the illusion? What if you replaced it with nothing? You would then see everything differently: you wouldn’t want to go anywhere without those shoes; you would feel happy when someone smiled at you; you would not get upset when others lied about their age — all because there would be no “matchmaking” between anything or anyone.
You wouldn’t have any motivation for work; no motivation to save money; no incentive to be honest about your age; no incentive to try anything new! Everything would look just fine… but none of these things are true. Your body could not function without serotonin as a signal for where it should go next.
All this sounds too good to be true, so why do some companies use serotonin boosting drugs like Ritalin or Prozac? Well, it is not so much because they are right on target with their products; rather they are simply trying to keep people from thinking rationally in order to maintain the illusion of being able to control who they see and what they see around them.
So let me ask you again: Which one do you think is most likely to succeed? The one who has a better product or service; or the one who has better marketing? The latter is more likely to succeed because if people can only see what they want (and believe that all is well), then how will they make decisions about things outside of their immediate interest? Once people become excited about an idea — whether through need or desire — creating an illusion around it will help them keep interested in it long enough to pursue that interest further.
How Chocolate Affects the Body
Chocolate (obviously) affects the body. And not in a good way.
There is a lot of discussion about chocolate and weight management but this article is primarily about the effect it has on the mind. It has been shown that chocolate disrupts cognitive processes, that it decreases performance on tests of working memory and that it causes increased stress in people. In one study, participants were asked to think of a series of words starting with one letter, then repeating that for four minutes before shifting to another letter:
The experimenter stood in front of them and read out the words their minds started with at the start of each session:
The participants’ performance on these speeded-up trials deteriorated as they got older. The older they got, the worse they performed on these trials. This shows that there is a correlation between age and performance on these speeded-up trials.
The study was conducted by Dr Claire Hollon at University College London (UCL), where she also happens to be an expert in eating disorders. It suggests there may be some “biological mechanisms” involved such as stress or cortisol levels which are linked to eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or Bulimia nervosa (an extreme type of bulimia). I would suggest there is not much we can do about this without taking drastic measures so I won’t delve into those here except to say that if you have an eating disorder, you have probably had some impact on your health through what you eat — especially if you’re stressed out.
Effects of Chocolate on the Body
If you’re reading this post, chances are we’ve already been doing some research into chocolate and its effects on the body. We’ve taken a look at the effects of chocolate on our bodies (making us feel better), but we haven’t actually looked at the effect it has on our minds. It turns out that a little bit of chocolate does not a bad mood make …
If you happen to be flicking through the news in China these days, you may have noticed that many of the headlines are referring to “golden week” — a weekly holiday where people take time off work to enjoy some downtime, usually with family and friends. So far so normal, but what if that was an annual event? What if it was every year? And what if they had something special planned for it?
The first thing that comes up when you google “golden week” is any given date which falls on or around this weekend. On top of that, most have some aspect about “golden week” — Chinese New Year, Chinese New Year celebrations, etc. — being relevant to them as well. The second thing is how much time off work people can actually spend over the course of one day (or part of one day) during this week-long period. As such, there are a number of articles and pictures out there which show people enjoying their golden week with family and friends (often with alcohol in tow).
So what could be going on here?
Well first off, obviously it is important to understand how these holidays are organized in China as well as how they are celebrated across various regions in China. This piece is about how Chinese culture organizes holidays in general — but also about how their holidays affect their bodies (in terms of weight loss and drinking alcohol). I came across several articles already which explore this topic but none were very informative or well researched; so I decided to write my own piece from scratch from all angles (and couldn’t be happier with my result). I hope you enjoy reading this overview as much as I enjoyed compiling it!
Better Than Gold
I stumbled across this gem of a write up about two faced gold chocolate, which makes for a particularly good example of how to write on your product, even as you’re working on it.
It is a great excuse to get people to talk about your product.
I’ve made some tweaks to the original so that it can be seen as an example, but the basic concept is still valid.
So, here’s my introduction:
This is not a new or particularly interesting story — it doesn’t have any particular punch or character, and I don’t think I would have gotten through the first paragraph without this one observation about why we need it: It has been happening for years in the candy industry — manufacturers are making candy with more and more sugar in it. Sugar may not be bad for you — in fact, there are some studies which suggest that sugar consumption lowers blood pressure and helps prevent diabetes — but sugar is far from healthy! A recent sugar tax in California has led to an increase in sales of candy containing added sugars. In response, candy companies are going back to cheaper sugars like glucose syrup and honey. One by-product of these cheaper sugars is higher levels of fructose (a sweeter cousin of sucrose) that can cause problems with health and dental issues (and tooth decay). The FDA recently warned that sucrose-sweetened products should be labeled “contains added sugars.” This warning was based on research published by Dr John Hauser at Harvard Medical School, who conducted a study looking at the effects of eating sugary treats from different sources on blood lipids and insulin levels. In his paper titled “Sugars in Food Products: Effects on Blood Lipids and Insulin Levels” he found… well… considerable variation! Two aspects of sucrose-sweetened food that he looked at had an impact on blood glucose levels as well as insulin levels: fructose; and high glycemic index carbohydrates (which include corn syrup solids). Basically, because sucrose sweetens foods with so much fructose they tend to raise insulin levels; while high glycemic index foods tend to raise glucose levels. And when you look more closely at how these effects occur you find that they are very complex! In fact there appears to be a number of influences working together at any given time, such as how much food is eaten all at once; whether meals are eaten until full; whether sitting down or standing
Conclusion
I have a friend who sells gold bars, and he has a lot of fun with it. His business is quite good, though not quite as good as his chocolate business. The chocolate business is challenging — even in the best of times — and there are some days when he doesn’t make enough to cover his expenses, which hurts his chocolate sales.
One day I asked him how things were going and he told me that he was having trouble selling his chocolate bars (he had some problems with his demand curve). I asked him why it wasn’t working, and he said that people were buying less gold rings than they used to buy (they were buying them less frequently), so they were buying less gold bars. Then I asked him why people weren’t buying the gold rings more frequently. He said that people didn’t like the taste of the bars in their mouths, so they bought fewer of them, but if he made more gold bars for sale but sold fewer rings then it still wouldn’t be enough to cover his costs; if it wasn’t enough to cover those costs then he wouldn’t make any money at all.
So one thing you can learn from this story is about difficult marketing: it isn’t really about making a product better or adding more features or changing prices; it is about trying to change the culture of your customers so that they want what you are selling so badly that they will pay for it. That might mean you need to start by getting rid of your inferiority complex and embracing your market niche (for example, my friend makes high quality chocolate with big quantities at reasonable prices). You might need to work harder than you think at socialization or household training (for example, my friend sells only two kinds of gold bars: fancy ones used by wealthy people who want something special but don’t necessarily know how to use them) — or even better (for example, my friend starts out making wonderfully delicious chocolate for rich people using high quality ingredients and makes low cost versions for everyone else…).
The key thing here is not just about doing well but about doing well enough: getting on the gas until you come up against the wall and then preferring staying on top rather than fighting back hard against it (it becomes an ever-increasing price war) .