Chocolate chip cookies: half-baked branding idea?

As a former chocolate chip cookie junkie, I was amused to read a long story in The New York Times yesterday about two companies that have figured out how to make their customers actually salivate prior to entering the premises. And neither one of them is in the cookie business.

The first is Doubletree hotels, which offers every guest at every one of their 200 hotels around the world a 2 oz. warm chocolate chip cookie upon arrival, each one containing 20 Ghirardelli semi-sweet chocolate chips and a lot of chopped walnuts.

Midwest Airways puts two freshly baked, 1 oz. chocolate chip cookies in every passenger’s hands on every flight. I suppose if you sit next to someone who is allergic to chocolate, you could get four cookies. Midwest, which was recently swallowed up by Republic Airways (cookies and all), will not disclose the recipe, although the frozen dough is now appearing in some midwestern stores.

Both companies started this wonderful custom in the eighties and each one reports giving away about 10 million cookies a year, although if Midwest gives everyone two little cookies, you need to figure that into the numbers.

A branding consultant interviewed for the story said that in situations where nobody knows the difference between competitors, a “meaningless attribute like a cookie can create meaningful differentiation.”

I would like to put a different theory out there. First of all, since chocolate chip cookies are so intertwined with the human longing for satisfaction, I would never call a chocolate chip cookie “meaningless.” Second, people do know the difference between Midwest and Jet Blue and United.  Jet Blue would still be a good airline without the Terra Blues and the biscotti, but they make it a little nicer. Southwest would be an even better airline if they dumped the Nabisco for something a little higher class. But the truth is that when you travel you’re a prisoner, and you’re grateful for any morsels thrown your way.

I think what happens is that the cookie becomes a symbol of social exchange as Dan Ariely describes in Predictably Irrational. Here you are in an airplane, a million miles away from a freshly baked anything, and you’re getting cookies out of the oven just like mom used to make. The fact that they don’t have to do it, that it’s free, that they care about the recipe, that there’s a ceremony attached to the whole thing, that they do it every time–these are all important.

If United gave you cookies, they’d probably figure out a million ways to fuck it up. So it only works if the fundamental service you’re paying for works. My theory is that the cookies become a symbol for a company that people would love anyway. And Doubletree–I don’t know. Not a great hotel. But their cookie recipe looks pretty good.