I find branding fascinating. Not necessarily the day to day in-the-trenches brand work I crank out on a daily basis in corporate marketing, but the concept of branding. Branding, to paraphrase Wikipedia, is "creating the impression through advertising and graphics that a specific product or service has certain qualities or characteristics that make it special or unique" in order to "convince consumers to pay remarkably high prices for products which are inherently extremely cheap to make."
Isn't that crazy? What is it about the human brain, that is capable of such amazing intellectual feats, that so many of us buy into this? I fully own up to being part of the problem, but hey, you're buying. And so am I. As aware as I am, I still find some brands to have such a hold on me, I cannot possibly buy others. For example, King Arthur Flour, whose catalog I recently received and which jump-started this whole post. Is Pillsbury flour any worse? Possibly. Probably not. But it doesn't matter. My mother bought King Arthur. Her mother bought King Arthur flour. King Arthur was Est. 1790. It has that great William Morris kind of typeface that speaks to Victorian times and wheat pounded by grist mills in upper Vermont. Logically, I know it's made in a factory nowhere near a grist mill. But you could tell me that King Arthur flour is full of pesticide residue and I'd still be feeling grist mill in pristine Vermont.
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Ah, King Arthur. I love the bags too. I'm kind of into Bob's Red Mill unbleached organic flour. It gives me a similar nice warm fuzzy feeling. Pillsbury can't match that.
You know, I used to buy Gold Medal flour because my mom always did. But then I read a Cook's Illustrated issue that compared brand names of baking staples like flour, sugar, and butter. They found that sugar is pretty much the same across all brands, but flour is not -- the protein content varies and has implications for your baking. The folks at Cook's Illustrated preferred King Arthur. It's now what I've been using and I have no complaints. (Of course, I find the recipes in Cook's Illustrated to be kind of stodgy and uninspired, but their analysis of flour seemed useful.)
And speaking of protein content, the higher the content the denser the cookie right? I've heard to use a higher protein flour for really chewy chocolate chip cookies - even cake flour.
So, yay, King Arthur!
Someone say, Branding?!
As for the flour, I know how you feel about King Arthur. My mom bought it too so I bought it based on pure inertia and the assumption that my mother was never wrong about anything when it came to baking. Our old ad agency at Kayem (nail communications in providence) had that account for years so I blame them for my irrational love of king arthur flour.
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