Report on the July 13 session

Hi everyone, here's a more or less personal note from your facilitator, Steve.

It's a report on our previous meeting, on July 13.

If you were there you know the invited guest was there to introduce us to a nutritional product, and presumably, talk about nutrition. Instead, it turned out the representative didn't really know anything about nutrition, but knew a bit about marketing. Well, maybe more than a bit. Like what you would know if you majored in it in college.

The meeting ultimately took the form of a focus group for the benefit of this company and their product. The product, “Klick Bar", whose development is funded partially by former Nestle executives, contains, in each child’s-portion-sized bar all the ingredients research has said should be on a list as "good for battling ADHD”

For safety, and for access to the widest demographic possible, ingredients from lists of common allergens have been excluded. (Ironically, some of those allergens are on first the list too.) The company's best-case outcome goes something like this: Mom puts a bar in her ADHD kid's lunch box each day, and it becomes part of a long-term anti-ADD regime. The company sells a steady supply of these daily bars to larger and larger numbers of parents. The rep couldn't answer any specific questions about the amounts of nutritious ingredients in the bar, and without explicitly addressing it, she showed herself pretty solid on the fact that she didn't know anything about ADHD, or therapies and approaches to helping people who have it.

She was quite polite though.

“Are you concerned that this trivializes problems faced by kids with ADHD and their parents?”. One group member asked.

The company rep answered with a congenial smile, directed at no one in particular.

“Won’t having a special product for ADHD kids in their lunch box label the child as special when she pulls the bar out at lunch time?” Another member asked.

An unforeseen downside to marketing a “candy” bar for ADHD is that it might mark the kids who have it, in an environment that is not necessarily safe from ridicule, the school lunchroom. (When a student is given medication in school, she goes to the school nurse; it's a more or less private affair.) There was no slide, however, in her Powerpoint presentation that addressed this question, but the company rep remained composed. There was no Powerpoint presentation at all, actually, but the rep referred to her notes as slides a couple times.

"Doesn't this play on the fear and guilt of parents, without offering a substantial specific benefit?” another Adding it Up member asked. The Rep's neutrality and composure was an example to us all. She smiled, and shuffled her Powerpoint papers a bit. No impulse control problems here, and she stayed right on topic. Admirable.

The more we listened, the more apparent it was that this was the purest of pure consumer marketing, and that the product has about as much to do with ADHD as bingo has with sushi. The researchers listed are the public figures who have become famous riding a wave of growing awareness of ADHD and complementary therapy, and there's no specific research about their formula.

The rep spoke of parental choice, and of parents' desire to do what's right for their children, and how this cereal bar could be part of a therapeutic regimen for children. But upon questioning it became apparent that the product's main purpose was simply to turn a profit. (Not that there's anything wrong with that), that the ADHD revolution was a marketing boon and the capital venture firms are simply doing their job.

I hope the message the company gets from this session is that we thought this product had nothing to do with ADHD; that it is simply a cynical expression of corporate opportunism.

All the best,

Steve