Archive for the ‘marketing’ Category

According to a New York reader of Consumerist, a spinning class was trapped in Spiderman 3′s marketing web. PR Week also covers the phenomenon, from a very different perspective, quoting a NY Daily News story.

So what? Well, I don’t buy that this is a great thing. I think that if I were a New Yorker, by the time the damn movie opened, I’d rather trade punches with Doc Ock than watch it!

I wrote a column back in January about how this approach to marketing was doomed. And it’s still doomed.

This is just the most recent — and, to my eyes and ears, annoying — iteration of this race to the bottom, desperate to capture eyeballs approach to marketing and branding. Show me the results, I say.

I think it’s stupid, and the only argument I find the least redeeming about it is that at least they’re on solid ground with Spiderman, since he is a New Yorker. Metropolis Shmetropolis.

Just heard one of my colleagues call another.

“Sorry to bother you. I’m just sending something by courier, and I can’t remember which is faster — rush or urgent. Okay, bye.”

This is textbook bad communication/bad marketing for me. Someone at a courier company somewhere couldn’t bear to go:

• ‘fast, faster, fastest’?
• same-day, half-day, 1 hour?

So now we have “rush” and “urgent”. Same phenomenon as the deletion of “small” and its replacement with “regular.”

People talk about what a great idea it was for Starbucks to go tall/grande/venti, but sooner or later, whatever charm stuff like this has wears off, and you’re left trying to remember whether grande is bigger than venti. At least it’s obvious that a double-gulp is bigger than a big-gulp.

Ciao,
Bob.