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If you get excited about Chef Boyardee or Healthy Choice, it's because ConAgra Foods has gotten inside your head.

Forbes, August 19, 2009 — Not long ago ConAgra Foods assembled a group of 20 marketers and outside agency folks to figure out why sales of Orville Redenbacher's popcorn had gone stale. They spent nine months studying popcorn eaters, observing families in their homes and instructing them to keep weekly diaries of how they felt about various snacks. "That's when we uncovered the insight," recalls Stan E. Jacot, a ConAgra vice president. It seems that the essence of popcorn is that it is a "facilitator of interaction."

Store Brands Squeeze Big Food Firms†

After Profiting From Higher Prices, ConAgra and Other Makers Are Rethinking Strategy as Volume Falls

Wall Street Journal, March 27, 2009 — The slumping economy has begun to squeeze big food makers, forcing them to rethink their pricing strategies.

After a year in which they boosted prices to help offset higher costs for transportation and commodities such as corn, food companies are finding that consumers are increasingly trading down to cheaper "private label," or store-branded, food.

That's making it harder to continue raising prices.

An Old Buzzword Is Back: Bargains

New York Times, October 24, 2008 — As the year began, consumers started to see a trickle of advertisements that played up brand value rather than attributes like status or prestige. As the economy worsened in the spring and summer, the trickle became a torrent.

Now, as the crisis in finance continues, a veritable tidal wave of ads devoted to saving money is washing over the country.

Marketing textbooks suggest, however, that a focus in the short term on pinching pennies could in the long run have a deleterious effect on the images of brands or products by cheapening them.

Top Advertisers Add Meaning to Marketing†

P&G, Others Aim to Aid, Not Invade, by Crafting Purposeful Campaigns

Advertising Age, May 26, 2008 — Self-loathing has become all too commonplace in marketing, as Bridge Worldwide CEO Jay Woffington sees it, and not entirely without reason.

Young marketers or agency executives don't take long to learn they've dedicated their lives to creating stuff people seek to avoid, and with increasing success. But Bridge, a digital unit of WPP Group's Wunderman in, of all places, Cincinnati, ancestral homeland of Procter & Gamble Co. and interruptive advertising as we know it, thinks it has a disarmingly simple answer: "Marketing with Meaning."