Celebrity chefs Emeril Lagasse, Curtis Aikens, Wolfgang Puck and Martha Stewart caught my attention when I saw their smiling faces looking back at me in the June 2003 issue of Cooking Light magazine. Those four–and six other celebrity chefs–accompanied a brief on how your personality reveals the type of cook you are.
A recent study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign shows that nearly 90 percent of nonprofessional cooks fall into five distinct personality categories: giving cooks (Aikens), innovative cooks (Puck), healthy cooks, competitive cooks (Lagasse) and methodical cooks (Stewart).
Publicity Hound Brian Wansink, Ph.D. and professor of nutritional science and consumer psychology, led the study and was interviewed by Cooking Light for the article. When the reporter asked him for examples of cooks who would fit each of the five categories, he didn’t give them answers as mundane as “my mother.” Instead, he started naming well-known celebrity
chefs who he thought were the closest match.
A brilliant strategy! The magazine rounded up photos of the 10 celebrity chefs for a fun half-page feature, then offered a detailed description of each of the five types of cooks in his study. Brian told me that Prevention magazine did a similar feature and named celebrity chefs of its own choosing using his five categories. You can learn more about the study and read the news release at Food Psychology.
The Publicity Hound asks: How can you use celebrities in your publicity campaign? Can you tie them to a study like Brian did? Can they be the focus of a poll or survey? Can you name celebrities in a Top 10 list? (“Top 10 Celebrities Most Likely to…”) Or how about a Hall of Fame or a Hall of Shame?
You can even use the celebrity theme when submitting a brief. “Briefs, Fillers & Quizzes: How to Write Them and Why Editors Love Them” is a one-hour teleseminar that gives you dozens of ideas for off-the-beaten-path brief items you can submit to newspapers and magazines. The audio cassette or CD is $29.95 plus shipping.