V timalei haaretz chamas
A patient with diabetes asked how to gain weight. She was thinking about Ensure – a liquid shake; I suggested Glucerna and then showed her what it looks like – on the manufacturer’s website.
Glucerna is made by Abbott, a huge and to my knowledge well-respected company.
Well, the product label highlights that it is “1 Carb Choice”. What’s the problem with that. It’s technically accurate.
The problem is that people with diabetes – these days – think in terms of how many carbs are in the product. They read “1 Carb” and cognitively ignore the next word, with which most people with diabetes in the past decade or so are unfamiliar, ‘Choice’.
So they think Glucerna has only 1 gram of carbs when it really has 16 grams of carbs, or 12 grabs of ‘net’ carbs.
Abbott, in my opinion, is playing on people’s cognitive weak spot in order to sell more Glucerna.
Don’t get me wrong. It is a reasonable product for many people with diabetes.
But this is precisely a classic case of ‘Chamas’: taking advantage of a weakness in a person, in this case, a cognitive weak spot, to sell more product than if the person understood that the product had more grams of carbs, in which case, they would then compare it with other products with a similar amount of carbs and possibly less expensive.
When such ‘marketing’ tricks are rampant, it is a big Kitrug. We saw what happened in Dor Hamabul.