Top Three Tuesday: Marketing

Over the next four weeks you are going to see some of the most spectacular marketing you will ever lay eyes on.  In a season where economic uncertainty is so prevalent, an easy sell is going to be as hard to find as a three legged ballerina.  Our family is looking for a digital camera this Christmas and we are going to be white knuckled penny pinching cheap about it thank-you very much.  I won’t buy it unless it is a spectacularly good deal.  Let’s just say that if the sales person isn’t crying, I won’t be happy.  So…

Top Three Examples of Over Achieving Marketing
(or selling a marginal product extremely well)

3. Lime Flavoured Anything
When did everything start coming in lime flavour? How did this happen? There must be some incredibly hard-working lime sales guy out there. He’s got people putting lime in everything! You can hardly buy nacho chips anymore without lime.

Lime Beer Whatever.

Lime Coke, fine.

Lime Coffee?

Lime Jerky??

Lime Kitkat (now that’s just wrong!)

Just to warn you. Cucumber is next

2. Bottled Water

I know I could get some heat for this but I am amazed at how quickly people have become complete convinced that tap water is terrible for their health. Nowadays if you offer someone tap water they look at you like you just put a cup a cat sick in front of them.   It has now gotten so bad they are putting out advertising for tap water!   I bet if you went back in time 10 years and told people that they, worldwide would spend $60.9 billion on water in plastic bottles they would think you were out of your tree.  Market analysts say that by 2011, consumers will purchase 174.3 billion liters of water (worth over $200 billion dollars!) Check here for stats.   In 2004, Andrea Petersen wrote in the Wall Street Journal that “… for the first time, Americans are expected to buy more bottled water than beer or coffee.

And the number one example of marketing out-punting its coverage is …

1. Nutella

It is nothing less than a stroke of genius to take a jar of chocolate icing and sell it to people as a healthy food choice for children. I just can’t believe it. I always thought that it was just a binge food for people who can’t get enough chocolate, but then I saw the commercials with the mom talking about its part of a healthy breakfast. (insert kids eating Nutella with a half a grapefruit, bran buds, some Mueslix) Never mind that if you put a roofing nail next to fresh fruit it would also be part of a healthy breakfast – yeah, an completely unneeded part.   Chocolate icing helps kids in school??? I’m speechless.

We need to get the Nutella people working on getting kids to quit smoking or world poverty, or something. If these guys could sell chocolate icing as a healthy food choice, they can sell anything!

Nutella commercial from France (nes pas)

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