Sasha Crane/Hooks
• Gaia Foods®: Gaia Foods® is a national grocery chain based in Prospect. Their marketing pitch is built around the idea of organic, fair-trade, healthy products. They sell upmarket food products from around the world, but also have plenty of (less-than-obvious) in-house brands: coffee, chocolate, baking ingredients, ice cream, snacks, pasta, breakfast cereals, vitamins and dietary supplements, pet treats, etc. ad infinitum. Smaller stores more pressed for space are simply groceries (while also selling ready-to-eat cold sandwiches, salads, and so on), but larger stores have restaurant areas that sell hot meals, with available space for people to sit, eat, and relax. There's also online shopping, and home delivery programs for your local store to deliver your grocery list to you.
• Hearth®: Hearth® is a chain of fast-casual restaurants available nationwide in major cities. Hearth® pitches itself as "Craft Casual™" and focuses on sandwiches, soups, salads, and hamburgers (both standard and meatless). Thanks to their "hip," distinctly un-corporate branding and presentation, Hearth® is especially popular with university students, and most of their locations are carefully targeted to exploit that market. Overall, their fare is adventurous without being TOO adventurous; their most devoted customers are people who brag about liking sriracha, and post pictures of every meal they eat online.
• Maestro®: With its catchy advertising slogan of "Be the Maestro™" repeated by seemingly every podcast in the English language, Maestro® has taken off as the latest successful initiative of the Gaia Foods® empire. Maestro® is an online service that delivers via mail ingredient sets and recipes for chef-inspired DIY meals. Serving a variety of dietary needs and preferences, Maestro® is marketed toward people who either don't have time in their busy lives to plan out fancy meals on their own, or who don't know how to cook but would like to learn.
• This writing is trying to pull you in much like an eye-catching picture. It is designed to get you to READ IT. This is called luring the VICTIM, and you are the VICTIM. But if you have a free mind you should STOP READING NOW! because all we are attempting to do is to get you to read on. Yet this is a DOUBLE BIND because if you indeed stop you'll be doing what we tell you, and if you read on you'll be doing what we've wanted all along. And the more you read on the more you're falling for this simple device of telling you exactly how a good commercial design works. They're TRICKS and this is the worst TRICK of all since it's describing the TRICK whilst trying to TRICK you, and if you've read this far then you're TRICKED but you wouldn't have known this unless you'd read this far.
