You Can Take It With You: Marketing to Those on the Go

Faster food: The Milky Way 2 To Go candy bar is pre-cut for people with hectic lifestyles.

That Milky Way bar? It's self-aware. It realizes that you don't need to be told it's portable. "To go" is not a selling point for the chocolate, it's an affirmation of you: I recognize who you are, it says. I understand that you are the type of person who needs something to fit your busy lifestyle.

The candy bar is not actually a solution to that lifestyle. It is a status symbol, like the now-ubiquitous yoga-mat-as-proof-of-serenity. The "To Go" Milky Way is proof of chaos, proof of over-scheduling, proof that maybe you deserve to eat the candy bar, whether walking or sitting.

Some brands seem to be perfectly aware of the irony in their On the Go (or not) messages. Take Nescafe's "Taster's Choice On the Go," one of 103 "beverage sticks" (just add water) introduced since 2006 -- compared with just 10 launches between 2000 and 2005. The back of the Nescafe box offers three examples of the highly active occasions for which the sticks, like shorter, fatter Pixy Stix, are particularly useful. Two are:

(1) For parties and get-togethers.

(2) At work.

Work. For the office manager who intersperses e-mailing with decathlons.

Like Milky Way, Nescafe doesn't care about actually being On the Go as much as it wants to prove that it gets you: You feel like you're on the go, much too on the go to go to the office coffeepot, even to have your butt leave your ergonomic chair.

But this comforting empathy can lead to blobby consequences.

Brian Wansink heads Cornell University's Food and Brand Lab, which studies why people buy and eat the things they buy and eat. "The deceivingly dangerous thing about foods that are labeled 'On the Go' is the same thing that's dangerous about foods that are labeled low-fat. We don't really count them when we add up our calories." The lab recently completed a study in which participants consumed a meal standing and then sitting, and then estimated their calorie intake for each meal. Nearly all drastically underestimated the count in their stand-up meals. That Milky Way? A full 460 calories, whether you shove it all in your mouth at once or save some for later.

What starts out as On the Go usually ends up as on the hips.

Or, in some cases, in the liver.

Enter . . . the Pocket Shot, a sporty-looking tear-top plastic pouch filled with vodka, rum, whiskey, gin or tequila. Unlike Nescafe, Pocket Shots are not meant to be consumed only at sissy places like work or parties. The Web site suggests drinking them while: Biking! Swimming! Rollerblading! Hiking! among other activities. Seeing as the product's tagline is "Flask on the Fly," one wonders when Piloting an Airplane! will be added to the list.

The target audience for this is unclear (marathoners? astronauts?). Actually, scratch that. It's totally clear. Pocket Shot is for anyone who needs to wash down a Go-Tart with a good stiff drink.