Clam Chowder

Why is it that once you leave home you start to want to make everything you ate there. Except here people eat my food after I make it.

Today I decided to make clam chowder for cena (dinner, or supper for my family). I may have included a little bit of whole goats milk, used purple onions instead of white ones, had no actual cooking times in my recipe, used a coffee mug for a measuring cup... oh and fresh clams (this adds a lot of extra work).


However, it still tasted amazing.

Branding

While living in the country where you were born, sometimes the brands you choose and the reasons you choose them become subconscious. You pick what you've always seen at home, or what your friends have, or what commercials you've seen. When you stroll into a grocery store for some snacks you pretty much recognize all the brands you see on the shelf - because you've been there many times before.

What happens when you move to a new country, with new brands, and new powerplayers for the products you buy everyday.

Example # 1 - Shampoo

Before I left I stocked up on shampoo, conditioner, and body wash. My favourite kind - Herbal Essences. The stuff that leaves my hair silky smooth all the time. I wanted to make sure that I wasn't left in the dust once I arrived to my new home in Tuscany. Although they do have the brand here, (comon its P & G) its not everywhere you can buy shampoo. When you think about the reasons why we stick to one brand, or the reason why I felt I needed to bring three months worth to Italy, it makes those marketing classes seem a lot more valuable. When I had one suitcase to bring, I chose to fill it with products I knew and trusted, rather than pack something else and buy what was *available* in my new country.

Example #2 - Cookies

I had the great opportunity to go to Roma with Jared and his parents in November. We stopped on the Autostrada for some gas, snacks, and a caffè. While we stared at the wall of cookies and wafers the a couple of main brands stand out.

Kinder is everywhere here, with so many products that I haven't seen before. However, my past experiences with Kinder have always been Suprises, and they tend to be fun, but somewhat unhealthy options. The other main brand here is Mulino Bianco, a company that has been around here since 1971. Its products are simply branded and represent healthy breakfast, caffè, and anytime snacks. This brand is present in many houses here in Italy and I chose the Cuor di Mela for the trip.

Eample #3 - Facial Wash

Italians consumer more olive oil in a week than I think I did in a year at home. I am also working in a commercial kitchen on occasion that cooks with a lot of splashy oil. Long story short, I didn't have my Clean & Clear with me (The one thing I should have brought). So, one day in Firenze, we stopped into a specialty store (I think every store in Italy, maybe Europe is specialty. Cheese, meat, pharmacies, they are all separate stores and most locally owned.) to buy some facial wash. I searched the entire store for my tried and true product - to no avail. I was shown various other European products that I'm sure would have done the job. But guess which product I went home with. An eight or nine Euro squeeze bottle of Garnier. And I love it. Even though every bottle in that store was written in only Italian, I relied on past experiences, brand identity, and a colourful container to make my choice. Exactly as the textbooks said I would.


These examples made me ponder about the stimulii that entice people to buy one brand over another. Numerous business articles have been written about this subject, and my specialization happens to be in finance, not marketing. However, I think as I stay longer here I'm beginning to realize what topics interest me more than others. Below is an excerpt of a Harvard Business Review Article on Brand Identity.

*In the June 2009 issue of McKinsey Quarterly, my colleague David Court and three coauthors introduced a more nuanced view of how consumers engage with brands: the “consumer decision journey” (CDJ). They developed their model from a study of the purchase decisions of nearly 20,000 consumers across five industries—automobiles, skin care, insurance, consumer electronics, and mobile telecom—and three continents. Their research revealed that far from systematically narrowing their choices, today’s consumers take a much more iterative and less reductive journey of four stages: consider, evaluate, buy, and enjoy, advocate, bond.*

When we get into our daily habits at home this process is often quick, subconscious, and without too much thought - especially for low cost items that are not complicated. But throw yourself into a new culture of brands and traditions and you regret shaking your head saying *but this is all common sense!* It might be common sense, but it still takes strategic thinking for the company to put all the marketing steps together in syncrony.

Centuries of Tradition

This is the old way of pressing olives for their oil. The olives are harvested in late October to early December. Good olive oil should be used within a year and new olive oil from Tuscany is green in colour and tastes quite spicy. The room where the olives are pressed is quite warm in order to get the maximum extraction. Each farmer's olives are labelled in order to keep the batches separate, you want to taste your own olive oil for that nostalgic, grew it yourself feeling, and for the reputation of your brand.

Rain, Rain, Don't go Away

This is Tuscany in the fall. You can see the umbrellas at Mac Dario, you can't see the hills of Tuscany through the fog, but the rainbows are quite common.

Cavalli

It's Italy.

The saying I've been toting around for about two months now.

Italy has a way of making things happen, Canada has a way of planning things before they happen. At the moment I am in Italy. So here in December I find myself now casually working at Dario Cecchini's famous butcher shop and spending my frequent days off cleaning the apartment, going for walks around Tuscany, and today going to work for my horseback ride. As the other stagista's flew back to America I found myself the only native English speaker left. (Yes, Lorenzo, Riccardo, and Yadava all speak English)

I strolled over to Riccardo's parent's house to find a pair of rubber boots to wear in the rich soil while brushing down my favourate animals. Cavalli!

It seems that throughout my life I've managed to keep in touch with these animals having never actually owned one of my own. I worked at a horse farm when I was younger to have the experience of smelling the sweet hay and molasis, touching the horses' soft nuzzly noses, and sometimes, when I am lucky to jump on the back of one and go for a ride.

Riccardo casually asked me one day in the butcher shop - what would make your time here in Italy the most memorable. I spit out, I love horses. And it so happens that a father of a friend owns a couple, is just retired, and needs a little extra help feeding and brushing the graceful beasts on occasion. And so, this afternoon I will get back in touch with the soil, some rubber boots, a farm situation, and of course, Horses!

Mi Dispiace

So I haven't really been keeping this up! Every day I come up with a title for the day, but never seem to actually sit down and write about it. So I'll start with the *stew story*.

Everyone at Macelleria Cecchini takes turns making staff lunch, so one slow, rainy, and bone chillingly cold Sunday at Mac Dario I decided to make Stew. This stew has been made in various places including a mountainside in BC and at home in the farm kitchen in Stratford. This stew is a favourite of Sunday's lunch, especially in the winter. Well stew and Dutch soup, but I don't have the spices to make that here.

I started out with some water, potatoes, celery, carrots, red onion, an old tomato, Cecchini beef, alloro, some chiodi di Garofano, Oregano, and a mix of spices I found in the *lunchtime spice drawer* in the kitchen of Mac Dario. I added in some flour to thicken in near to the end of the long boil. Seems stewy enough right? Apparently stew doesn't really exist like this in Italy. (Maybe in Tuscany but only if there is bread mixed in with it) Anyways, I explained to Riccardo what stew was and how nostalgic is it to me. One of those things you make on bone chilling, cold, rainy Sundays. It turned out to be a total sucess except for one problem...

Dante, the famous Maestro Magical spooned some into a bowl, poured olive oil and sprinkled profumo del Chianti all over it. Essentially ruining the entire dish, after which he said under his breath in a totally contented way *Mi piace la zuppa!* and *Questa zuppa è buona!*

Angelo, a plumber who works at Macelleria Cecchini on weekends pulled out a bowl and filled it with the steamy substance. He also murmured how much he loves zuppa.

Later on that day, Dario returned from Belgium with his wife Kim. Extremely hungry, he eyed my stew and I asked him *Dario ne vuoi un po?* He said *Siiiiiii* and took another steamy bowl of my stew downstairs to fulfill his hunger. About an hour later I ran downstairs to grab something and while passing Dario he exclaimed in his loud and pronounced style *Grazie per la zuppa Heidi, questa è buona!*

After hearing that Kim meandered upstairs to the kitchen to also grab some stew. Now, Kim is originally American, and so I assumed maybe she would recognize my stew as what it was, stew.

But alas, all day my stew was labelled as Zuppa - and each time it was stereotyped into soup I exclaimed to Riccardo, *It's not Soup, its STEW!!!* I suppose I should just enjoy the fact that it was edible and I didn't burn anything while attempting to make my stew.