Think you’re hip to the hottest consumer trends?
Well, unless you’re all over spreadable bacon, My Little Pony, Honey Badger and Pickle Juice, you are nowhere, my friend.
Time to go to school, fool.
Ad Age, the bible of Madison Avenue, released its annual list of 25 hottest brands Monday, and along with obvious choices such as the Chevy Cruze and the HTC smartphone, apparently America can’t get enough of Street Skillet Bacon Spread and My Little Pony.
Seattle’s Street Skillet’s revenue is $3 million so far this year, mainly on the strength of the sale of bacon jam. It’s one of Rachel Ray’s fall favourite foods.
Admit it: never in a million years would you consider bacon jam a million- dollar idea. That’s why Josh Henderson is a successful entrepreneur and you aren’t. No jam.
I bet you also let Pickle Juice slip through your fingers, too. Not so for Brandon Brooks, who had the vision and foresight to believe that people will buy anything as long as it’s sold as an electrolyte replacement. Brooks is planning to blend Pickle Juice with pomegranate to make it taste better, which only goes to prove that a spoonful of sugar helps the Pickle Juice go down.
The list includes a bunch of nostalgia items, like Goldfish, those tasteless little crackers that are hot again, even though they’re still tasteless. But after bacon jam and Pickle Juice, that’s probably a good thing.
Then there’s the inexplicable rebirth of My Little Pony, the foremost mania of my daughter when she was a little girl, some 25 years ago. I could never figure out why she would brush Her Little Pony for hours, yet I could never get her to brush the dog. I assume My Little Pony smelled better.
What’s really weird is that the latest craze is being driven by an audience of adolescent and adult males called “bronies.” They have their own podcast called Bronyville and their own New York convention called BroNYCon. The My Little Pony website has 71 million hits.
As weird as all of the above are, topping the list is the Honey Badger, which started as a bit player in a National Geographic special and has morphed into the Tasmanian Devil of the 21st century. He’s so bad, he eats venom-spitting cobras alive and braves thousands of bee stings to eat their larvae. He’s now the spokesvermin for Wonderful Pistachios, which he cracks by whacking them with a snake.
Don’t believe me. Check him out on YouTube, where he has 23 million hits, but he don’t care.
He’s just bad.
Correction notice: An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified Bacon Jam creator Josh Henderson. Metro regrets the error.
