Two Successful Marketing Campaigns

I read articles about various marketing methods that get people to spend more money.  I have to laugh at those articles because those marketing ploys don’t work on my.  I don’t follow the pattern they are saying consumers follow.  This could be because I happened to be one of the rare women who hate to shop.  I also just can’t believe that the masses are as completely gullible as that.

This image of the 99 cent menu is a little off as most of the items on the old 99 cents menu are now over a dollar but under two dollars.

I also disagree with the marketing concept that even a bad ad is okay because people will remember the product and not the ad.  Years and years ago, Wendy’s had a marketing campaign that I hated.  The more I saw it the more negative I felt about Wendy’s.   I eventually forgot the series of ads that I thought were so bad, but every time I drove past a Wendy’s, I felt the same negative feelings and disgust.  I didn’t go to a Wendy’s restaurant in about a decade.   I think it was the spicy chicken sandwich that got me to go back. 

I’ve stopped going again.  The changes they made to make their food seem more like ‘real’ food were bad changes.  I haven’t had a good serving of fries there in two years and the quality of some of the other stuff has been going downhill during that same time. So I just stopped altogether.

There are two marketing campaigns that have worked on me. 

 

One came out when I was very young, so it didn’t affect my shopping habits but it probably explains why I was a Coke fan over Pepsi.  Today, I go between both equally.  But anytime they do a retro ad campaign (I know they did it sometime in the 1990’s as well as more recently), this one gets to me and I want Coke.  It was the “I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony” advertisements.

Pepsi copied this add campaign with a song that sounded very much like it.  I thought they used the fund raising song, “We are the World”, but upon looking that up, it turns out that some people objected to “We are the World” because they thought it sounded too much like a Pepsi jingle.  I guess the jingle came first and the song came later.

I was sure Jeremy Piven had done a remake of this commercial in the 1990’s but I can’t find a reference of it anywhere.

But the best marketing campaign ever is also from the 70’s.  They wrote a jingle and hired an actor who could sing and dance to perform in the commercial, An American Werewolf in London’s David Naughton.  This good looking, young actor danced around signing a song that still gets stuck in my head several decades later.  “Wouldn’t you like to be a pepper too, Dr. Pepper, drink Dr. Pepper.”  I will admit that I usually see a later version of this commercial with a shorter, more muscled, actor with short hair.  I thought it was Jeremy Piven, before he did the 1998 TV show, Cupid. My research seems to indicate I am wrong. 

  To this day, when I see the red cans w/ the Dr. Pepper logo, that song starts to filter through my brain and I start to crave a Dr. Pepper.  A few days back, I saw a Facebook post for Dr. Pepper asking, “When was the last time you drank one?”  The song started to play in my brain as I thought to myself that I didn’t know when.  The past three mornings, I’ve gone straight to the machines at work and started my day with a bottle of Dr. Pepper.

Clearly, I’m a sucker for a really well written jingle.

Lair of the Lion and My Crazy Week, Happy FRIDAY!

This week has been on the crazy side.  So I’ve missed another couple of days.

First, I ended up being very sad when I watched Eureka and Dr. Holly Martin (?) was killed.  Yeah, my favorite character and I can’t remember her exact last name.  From the first episode with Felicia Day, her character became my favorite character.  The way she was killed off seemed so senseless.  I see some people hoping that she is somehow saved.  I just don’t see it happening with the way the Senator instructs some people to dispose of her.  I don’t think Beverly would have the chance to try to save her.  She flatlined.  Flat out flatlined.  I just don’t see it being changed.  I do agree with the people who feels this motivates Beverly to change sides.  She always thought she was on the right side, the good side, the side not under the thumb of the military.  She always tried to avoid causing real injury to people.  So the Senator’s actions are anathema to her view of the Consortium or whomever they really are.  And based on the teaser for next week, it looks like I might be right.

Then there was the car trouble that turned out to be relatively painless and easy to fix.  (White smoke from tail pipe.  Oil Change and Engine Coolant.  56$) And then work issues with my keyboard.  Or more importantly, the soda (Dr. Pepper) I bought that kept exploding all over me yesterday.  I was so happy to get home to rinse off.  I couldn’t open a soda to save my life yesterday.

I managed to get some Tempura that was okay, but not as good as I like.  So I’m still jonesing for proper Tempura.  Still, a Shrimp Tempura and a Veggie Tempura appetizer makes a decent Tempura dinner for 11$. And work was crazy for a couple of days, but then it slowed to a crawl. 

The really important but utterly irrelevant and rather meaningless and useless thing is I got my Tauntaun in SW’TOR.  It is very tiny and very cute.  I also got the GW birthday pet.  I think my bird was prettier.  The Hell Hound looks like super heated stone.

I finished a book and I had to do my review for Goodreads.  Since I’m feeling Lazy, that will be most of this blog.  It probably isn’t the most in-depth review.  But it is better than some of the two-liners I often see.  Okay, two sentences, but two-liners just sounds better.

Christine Feehan’s books have gotten highly repetitive. Sometimes it feels like the same people with different names. In fact, it reached a point that I only read them because of the story arc that spanned many books was more interesting than the individual books themselves. Lair of the Lion was a nice change.

Clearly a book outside of the other sets she has going, this 2002 book is about people under a curse rather than a completely different race of people. I give it four stars because it was a refreshing change from most of her books. It may be a tad high because there were so many places where the story could have really delved into more deeply. Much of the back story that created the personalities and motivations was glossed over.

Romance novels are usually stand alone books that may have a series tying various characters together. But each book is only about one couple. This book had so many areas that could have been explored that it could have been taken out of the realm of romance and into a multi-book drama/fantasy.  I would have like to have read that.

 

In a sing song voice:

 

I like tea, tea likes me, tea makes me pee.

 

It’s Friday, just go with it.   HAPPY FRIDAY!