Why?

Why do ad firms and more importantly their clients allow commercials to portray their current customers as nimrods? I understand if you’re making someone who uses your competitor’s product or service, but why bite the hand that feeds you?

This has bugged me for some time. Two recent examples are a Comcast commercial and a TGI Friday’s commercial. The Comcast one shows a family having dinner and shouting at each other because of the high noise outside of their house. White Bread mom’s response to her son’s success is “that’s Comtastic!” The camera zooms out to show the family is living on a freeway. The commercial implies that life is fast (on the electronic super highway that is metaphorically portrayed by a dirty, congested, real-life highway?) with Comcast. If you’re dumb enough to live on the highway, perhaps you’d like Comcast? A similar commercial about two years ago, spoofing cables prices and how they suck, had a family that had to shout because their TV acted like a vacuum cleaner – obnoxiously loud and pulled everything towards it. The cable sucks campaign made a lot more sense and didn’t make satellite customers look dumb.

The Fridays example is in the vein of most beer commercials. White dudes have it rough when they date dumb women ( a quick aside, this as offensive is the “sausage fest” campaign from last year where four dudes sat together loving their meat.”) In this case, the man and woman are dining at a Fridays and are trying to order. The woman can’t make up her mind because of all of the possible selections on the three-course menu. While she keeps changing her mind, the boyfriend/husband gives up and his head drops to the table. Beyond the undercurrent of misogyny, we have the customer looking bad? In this case, why do they look bad, because the Fridays menu is so damn confusing -- we've got features, features, and more features, as our marketing hacks are turning us into a commodity. Fridays, why don’t you take it a bit further and just have your new tagline be “Fridays, where suburban dumbasses are separated from their money.”

Packaging a Nation?

Travel and Leisure has an article about the packaging of a nation. To promote tourism, among other economic reasons, some countries are turning to brand “experts” for help position their country to outsiders. The attached article discuss some things that work and others that don’t.

In the case of this article, the limitations of the term brand are evident. I think “symbolic identity” would be more interesting and valuable. However, the articles is thought provoking as it still brings to mind questions about how people view the world around them and live in a symbolically created world which provides meaning, emotion, identity, and motive for action.

Here’s some hyperbole from the article:

"Ecuador and dozens of other countries are using increasingly sophisticated
versions of "brand theory" to attract visitors. Indeed, place branding may
be more important than ever, both as a way of standing out from the
competition and as a ballast against the buffeting winds of an increasingly
global popular-media culture that can shape perceptions drastically and in
an instant. "

Thanks to Alyssa for the article.

Lovemarks: Book, Strategy, and Kevin Roberts as self-proclaimed hero

More on the Lovemarks phenomenon. I posted something similar in September.