Influence and reality

A little more than two years ago, I did a Consumed column about Splenda. In the few years it had been on the market, the stuff had become the top-selling sugar substitute, with annual sales of more than $175 million. The brand’s tag line was the mysterious “made from sugar, so it tastes like sugar.” Among those unimpressed by this confusing claim were the makers of other sugar substitutes, as well as the Sugar Association. The makers of Equal had sued Splenda parent Johnson & Johnson, and the Sugar Association had started an anti-Splenda web site.

Right after the column appeared, I got an email from someone at a consulting company that tracks “online buzz,” chastising me for failing to check in with him before writing the column. Basically their data showed that the online buzz on Splenda had turned negative, largely as a result of the Sugar Association campaign. “The Sugar Association is really executing some effective reverse marketing….. What was once positive grassroots enthusiasm [for Splenda] seems to be turning negative.” The implication was that I’d made a fool of myself by writing about Splenda right when it was about to collapse in popularity, as the online buzz revealed. The “data,” I was informed, “underscore tremendously the crisis that Splenda is in.”

I checked back with this person six months later, in September 2005. I asked if there had been any decline in Splenda sales. “We don’t track sales – we only track the consumer buzz online among the hundreds of thousands of most engaged and influential food/nutrition consumers,” I was told. And the buzz among these people was still “very mixed,” with a lot of negative chatter about potential Splenda side effects, etc.

Interesting, I guess, but my editor is always pestering me for actual facts, so I forgot about the whole thing — until seeing a story in the WSJ on Friday. The Equal vs. Splenda trial is about to begin; the issue is whether Splenda marketing has misled consumers. And that’s an interesting issue, which maybe I’ll write about later.

But what jumped out at me was the fact that Splenda is still the top-selling sugar substitute, with sales of $212 million in 2006 – which is a 21 percent increase since I wrote that column.

Some “crisis”! Now I understand why that consultancy doesn’t track sales: Because the reality of what’s happening in the marketplace doesn’t sync up with the “influence” that it’s supposedly quantifying. After all, what do rising sales say about negative buzz among among “influential food/nutrition consumers”? If the “influential” consumers are buzzing negatively, and sales go up – then who, exactly, are the influential consumers influencing?

I’m astounded that consultancies can peddle this line that they’re collecting valuable, insightful, predictive data about online “buzz” — that ends up having absolutely no correlation to what happens in offline reality. But I probably shouldn’t be astounded. Maybe I’m failing to grasp how an “influential” consumer is defined. Maybe the key is to remember that they don’t necessarily have all that much, you know, influence. Except among certain consulting firms, and, perhaps, their paying clients.