The Big Fat Marketing Blog

It’s easy for marketers to fall in line; One duck after the other swimming to keep up with the one breaking ground with a new marketing idea.

Purchases that trigger a charitable donation are just such an example. Some smart marketer long ago thought up the idea. Now consumers can’t walk into a store without tripping over a pitch to buy one thing and donate to another. And while it’s all for good causes, it’s stale, moldy, boring marketing. Consumers do want companies to look out for others and will support them, but innovation will make these promotions work harder. Isn’t that the point?

Enter Disney.

Disney’s offer to give 1 million free tickets to its parks to people who complete a day of volunteer work is ingenious.

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New York is not the place to leave unattended bags around.

When I first heard that the Burlington Coat Factory was staging a guerrilla campaign and planning to leave 500 bags around New York City within a week of Sept. 11, I wondered what they were thinking.

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There’s nothing as sobering as a reality check.

The latest public awareness campaign to remind New Yorkers that drinking soda is thickening our bellies shows a soda being poured into a glass. But the glass is not filling with frothy, delectable, ice-cold pop. It’s filling with globs of fat with oozing white gelatinous mounds overflowing down the side. The message? “Don’t Drink Yourself Fat.”

The three-month campaign from the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene includes posters in the subway system and a multilingual health bulletin. Three versions of the poster show what appear to be a caramel-colored soda, a green sports drink and an iced tea. It’s an eye-opener.

The American Beverage Association called the campaign, which began Aug. 31, “so over the top that they are counterproductive to serious efforts to address a complex issue such as obesity … Balancing calories consumed with calories burned, regardless of the source, is the only generally proven approach to maintaining a healthy diet.

Soda marketers are in a tight spot, continually linked to the dramatic rise in obesity, particularly among children. The volume of the U.S. carbonated soft drink market, which includes energy drinks, tells the tale. Volume declined 3% last year, marking the fourth straight year of declines and wiping out years of growth from 1997 to 2004, according to Beverage Digest. Another interesting indicator of where things are headed is that a diet beverage, Diet Mountain Dew, was the strongest-performing Top 10 brand, Beverage Digest reported.

Even though beverage brands have beefed up marketing for healthier products like water the attacks that continue to pound away at sugary drinks seem to be working. New York City spent $277 on the campaign. A private donor added another $90,000 through the Fund for Public Health to have the ads placed on the subways.

The ads are startling. I’m not much of a soda drinker, but I really do enjoy a bottle now and again. But after seeing the posters, I can’t help but think that the images will likely be recalled every time I open a cola and start to pour. Yuck.

Judging by the enlightened opinion from the dais at last week’s ad;tech conference in Chicago—and by the chatter from the auditorium, show floors and breakout-session hallways—both marketers and agencies are expecting to see sunshine peeking through the economic clouds by the end of this year, and perhaps by the end of the quarter.

No one expects that recovery, if it comes, to bring marketing budgets back to pre-recession growth rates. To beat the weather metaphor to death, no one’s actually buying sunscreen. But they are taking off their hip boots and—carefully, tentatively, in a controlled fashion—seem to be getting back to the business of trying to find and talk to their customers in a fragmented media world. more

The teen retailer, Abercrombie & Fitch, frequented by preppy and status-conscious kids, has gone out of style. No matter how much it believed—and banked on—that kids would never, ever, ever abandon its stores filled with sexy clothes and half naked men, they did, and in record numbers.

It tried to ride out the recession maintaining its high prices, an arrogant mindset that turned off its customers. Most other marketers were listening to customers and acting accordingly, some by lowering prices, others by adding value, offering money saving options and suggestions or reworking messaging to relay compassion to worried, cash-strapped customers.

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I was walking down the street in my hometown the other day and I saw a child walk out of a candy shop with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth.

That would be a “Victory” cigarette, a look-alike candy version of the real deadly tobacco kind. If the brand name Victory sounds familiar, it should, its toxic similarity to Viceroy cigarettes made by Brown & Williamson can’t be missed.

Where are those lawmakers stamping down on tobacco marketers, implementing tough legislation that gives the Food and Drug Administration sweeping control over how marketers package, manufacturer and market tobacco products?

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