Friday, February 04, 2005
Don’t
Today I am officially illin’, and not in a cool Beastie Boys way. My symptoms don’t make for good reading, but I’m definitely under the weather and listless. But it’s a beautiful day, so the weather under which I am is not so bad, and as for being listless, I actually have a list I’d like to share with you. Here’s the background: I’m not in marketing. Not because I have some harebrained notion that marketing is to commerce what prostitution is to sweet sweet love; I understand that there’s a lot involved in making sure the products and/or services that I can’t live without get from the supplier to me, the consumer, and even in making sure that I, the consumer, realize that, without these products and/or services, I am likely to expire in a dessicated husk of unsatisfied need. I respect the marketers among us. Huzzah for the marketers, as was so often said in days of old, probably by people just as geeky then as I am now. Which brings me back, naturally, to me.
Despite my almost total lack of training in marketing (one wharton intro course and approximately 15 cumulative years of watching commercials and reading billboards and print ads), I see big marketing “don’ts” almost every day. Bad slogans, bad product names, bad choices straight down the line. Because I’m sort of dizzy this morning and thereby imbued with an inappropriately inflated sense of my own wisdom and importance, I’ve provided hereinbelow a short list of some of my favorite marketing Don’t’s that I’ve noticed over the past few weeks.
* Black and Mild cigars: forget that one reviewer said that these don’t even deserve to be called cigars, that “you might as well smoke a cigarette.” I don’t smoke cigars or cigarettes and I don’t intend to start. But if I did intend to start, I would not be starting with a nicotine-delivery device named after Sesame Street’s Gordon, the blackest and mildest dude on the drag. These are what I call “inimical references” (trademark pending), in which the item referenced is so different from the referent itself that consumer dissonance can only lead to marketplace rejection. In layman’s terms, you shouldn’t market something to inject toxic yet euphoric drugs into your body under a name that sounds like someone who teaches your kid how to cross the street. No, you shouldn’t. It’s just wrong. I’ve spoken. Stop arguing with me.
* Blast and Wipe: I couldn’t find a link for this product, but incredibly, it was recently for sale at Walgreen’s. It’s a handheld steam cleaner, with which one can “blast” a spot of offensive filth and then “wipe” it clean. Here’s the thing though, esteemed marketers of steam de-markers: this product name just sound rude. If I didn’t know what you were selling, I would have to ask myself: What is being blasted? And why does it need to be wiped? From snotrockets to nocturnal emissions, this product name evokes solely distasteful imagery, giving no hint of it’s actual purpose. It’s a name that belongs on a video game, perhaps, but not on a household cleaning item. Case closed.
* Also at Walgreen’s, I found recently a little newsletter-magazine at the pharmacy counter that comes out periodically to discuss strategies for living with diabetes. This is a laudable project, I have no quibble there. The mistake they made was to use the wrong cover model, whose picture grins ghoulishly over the caption, “Dick Clark: Still Rockin’ with Diabetes.” Well, it might have been a good idea to feature Mr. Clark when it first came up in staff meetings late in 2004, but now it’s “Dick Clark, still working his way back to release from hospitalization but not because of diabetes.” I am no big fan of Dick’s (that sounds wrong. No big Dick fan?) but I respect his important contribution to modern society and culture, such as it is. But when your “health and wellness” spokesmodel is lying in a hospital with a well-publicized stroke, well, that is not a stroke of marketing genius.
* In the fast-paced ever-changing world of technology, product and company names should strive for one of two qualities: currency or timelessness. If it doesn’t sound like tomorrow’s newest phenomenon, it should sound like something enduring and unchanging, trustworthy and reliable. What you don’t want is a name that evokes a failed experiment or an era of outmoded ideas and applications. “Twentieth Century Fox” still sounds good because it covers a large time frame and, as a name for a purveyor of culture, partakes of the glamor, creativity and energy of an amazing period of history. But the little computer shop on the ground floor of my building, “Beta Nineties Technology,” fails that test. A “beta” model is, in tech speak, an advanced experimental version, not ready for public distribution. As the second letter of the greek alphabet (alpha, beta, etc), it pretty much stands for “second best.” And as for using the last decade of the last millenium as the subject which “beta” modifies, well that’s just dumb. The nineties were a time when computers were steam-driven behemoths, hand-held caluclators regularly exploded from overuse, and just does not give rise to images of cutting-edge anything. The nineties are now a has-been decade, too recent to justify nostalgia (especially in the tech field), and too long ago to savor of modernity. Buying a computer at Beta Nineties is like buying food at Trial-run McSpoilage’s. How they stay in business is their business, but making fun of their name is mine.
* Finally, my favorite marketing don’t: Just don’t.
This concludes my condescending rant. Fill out a student survey on your way out of this blog entry, and don’t forget to sign up for my upcoming lecture on Stuff I Think I Know but Really Do Not. C’mon folks - I’ll have complimentary don’ts!
