We were watching a TV show over at my brother in law’s house on Christmas Eve, and an infomercial for the Miracle Blade knives happened to come on right after our show.
Now….I don’t normally watch infomercials. But having seen these knives before (and knowing that they’re not anything I’d allow in my own kitchen), I was curious to watch it from a marketing point of view.
It turned out to be perfect fodder for a blog post about shoddy marketing. This post is about the “straw man” argument.
A “straw man” argument, as applied to marketing, is marketing that pits the best features of one company’s product against either the worst features or an improper use of another company’s product.
In the video for the Miracle Blade set, they show a woman slicing a tomato with a non-Miracle Blade. She lines the knife up at shoulder height, and slams it down into the top of the tomato. Needless to say, the tomato is unfazed.
Anybody worth their salt knows that this isn’t how you slice a tomato. In fact, it’s not how you use any knife in the world – other than maybe a cleaver.
Later on in the video their spokesman (“Chef Tony”) shows how to slice bread with a smooth back-and-forth sawing motion of the Miracle Blade knives. Then he pulls out a regular knife (not a Miracle Blade, and not even a bread knife), and proceeds to use vertical pressure to crush the loaf of bread.
Again, this isn’t how you cut bread – and it’s not even how he cut the first slice with his knife. It’s a deliberate sham, combined with some quick-talking jokes and sales patter to distract you from what’s happening right in front of your eyes.
It’s no coincidence that every time they use or show a non-Miracle Blade knife, they deliberately misuse or misrepresent it.
This is all done to cover up a couple of major, inconvenient facts:
- The “Miracle blade” knives aren’t any better than regular knives. In fact they’re more cheaply made, and of shoddier workmanship.
- Somebody with an equivalent amount of experience to “Chef Tony” could do everything he does with a regular (and far more durable) knife set.
- Somebody without an equivalent amount of experience would have a hard time doing many of the food demonstrations that “Chef Tony” does, simply because most of the skill of using knives is in learning the appropriate ways to cut things.
When you see any marketing that makes a comparison between products, it’s important to carefully scrutinize how the competing product is portrayed.
There are many times when comparisons are fair, but you’ll save yourself a lot of headaches if you learn to be on the lookout for the “straw man”!