dolution

Faster Than a Microwave Oven; Better Than a Conventional Oven

Imagine that you want to bake a potato and have a choice between a conventional or microwave oven. The conventional oven will take a long time (at least an hour), but the potato will come out well cooked on the inside and crisp on the outside. In a microwave oven, the potato will be baked in less than 30 minutes, but it will not have that crisp, scrumptious exterior. Thus, the choice of oven in which to prepare the potato requires a trade-off between speed of cooking (the microwave oven wins hands down) and delectability of the finished potato (the conventional oven is the clear winner). What if there were an alternative, an oven that provides the quick-cooking ability of a microwave and the better-tasting result from a conventional oven?
Too good to be true? Well that was the challenge faced by the General Electric (GE) company in its marketing of the Advantium oven. The Advantium oven uses white-hot halogen bulbs in combination with microwave energy to cook foods as much as eight times faster than conventional ovens. The food tastes as good as if it were cooked in a conventional oven (in comparison to what one gets with microwave cooking) and comes out beautifully browned. GE somehow had to convince consumers that they could “eat their cake and have it too”—that is, that the Advantium oven can cook in microwave time, but the food is as good as from a conventional oven.
To alter beliefs it was critical that consumers actually experienced products cooked in an Advantium oven so they could learn for themselves that fast cooking and good tasting are not mutually exclusive benefits. Cooking demonstrations by retailers (followed by taste-testing by consumers) were important to assure people that it was possible to prepare items quickly that taste great.