Read Sales Pitch Society

6.28.02
Coup d'ephemera
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A Diamond Is for Lemmings
In Columbia, they've got the FARC rebels. In Sri Lanka, it's the Tamil Tigers. In Mexico's Chiapas, it's the Zapatistas. And in the U.S….we've got the anti-brides.

They're not fighting to topple any government, liberate any peoples or end impoverishment, but their convictions are just as formidable. They're on a mission to crush a more oppressive power than any corrupt political party or despotic dictator could ever match: the "wedding industrial complex." And they're doin' it in the cutest dresses ever.

As featured on National Public Radio's 6/13 Morning Edition show, the anti-brides are a motley crew of system-bucking brides-to-be who have banded together against the evil forces of marriage marketing. It's the enemy troops of "Type-A Bridezillas," armed with glossy wedding mags and egged-on by overbearing mothers, they aim to defy. Their fearless leader, Lori Leibovich, editor of Indiebride.com, threw down the gauntlet against these taffeta terrorists when she realized, after thumbing through countless bridal magazines, she just wasn't "getting excited about monogrammed ring pillows."

As if that isn't freakish enough, she actually thought there might be a few other establishment eschewing rogues out there who feel the same way. So, she decided to start a website dedicated to filling a "much-needed niche in the bridal media" and exploring "the whole marriage process."

According to the report, on the site "you can find a therapist who specializes in wedding issues or the alternatives to marriage project if you give up all together." Talk about irony. Here's an entire flock of fiancés who've become so frustrated by society's over-hyped obsession with fairytale matrimony that they've allowed the act of rebellion against it to consume them even more, so much so that they require therapy!

Hey, who ever said revolution was easy? A couple of visitors to Indiebride.com's "Kvetch" message board know what it's like to be trampled by tyranny. In a message string defiantly entitled, "Boycott Vera Wang" (apparently she's some wedding dress designer) "Anonymous" bemoans the injustice of an extra charge for a size 16 Vera Wang dress. In response, the brave "Katy" admonished, "That's just offensive…using their logic, size 2 women should get a *discount* on their dresses for the material 'saved,' shouldn't they?" In a true display of courage, Anonymous (incognito for fear of retaliation by the dreaded fashion police) stuck it to the marriage man, writing, "Right. But of course, they don't get a discount. The whole wedding/bridesmaid industry is such a scam…." According to unofficial reports, she hasn't been seen since.

Man, do I love the U.S. Where else can a group of educated individualists find nothing better to rally against than spending too much money on some cookie-cutter wedding dress? We're so privileged in this country. Our dictators don't exterminate ethnic groups or lock our innocent in work camps; they merely coax us into buying stuff.

Indiebride.com categorizes its outlook on marriage as "for lack of a better word - alternative." I'm not knocking the website, but to me, its existence and the existence of some wedding counter culture only serves to validate the significance of the "wedding industrial complex" that spawned it.

That's where the beauty of our free market system becomes all the more evident. There's no need to rise up against draconian dress designers and fascist bridal propaganda. The best way to shut down this establishment is to not buy into it.

Chai Babies
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Calming Teas Rattle New York Nerves
About five years back, I got into a brief conversation with some guy while standing on a Manhattan street corner waiting for the light to change. "How long have you been here?" he inquired. "Oh - about a year or so," I replied. His response gave me a false sense of confidence: "Wow!" he marveled, "if you lasted a year, you're set. Some people can't make it three months." To paraphrase the tune, "If you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere."

Yep. Only the tough survive the gritty city of Manhattan. The thin-skinned need not apply. Well, it turns out that rough New York exterior is totally September 10th. I'm sad to report that the skin of New Yorkers is now thinner than the crust on a slice from La Mia on 8th street. A June 18 article in one of the city's beloved rags, The New York Post, is evidence of this soft shift.

Notes the story, "A Starbucks ad campaign has ground to a halt after concerns that its posters - including one displayed near Ground Zero - callously mimicked the Sept. 11 tragedy." The offending posters feature two plastic cups overflowing with unnaturally colored icy sludge (Tazo tea drinks), surrounded by garishly green grass, a buzzing dragonfly and a few butterflies. The tag: "Collapse into Cool."

Apparently, the seemingly innocuous image, plastered in 3,000 Starbucks windows, bristled so many New Yorkers that the bean branders pulled the posters. Reading The Post's description of the picture, there's little wonder why. According to the overdramatic report, the posters depicted "two 'twin' cups of the concoction standing side-by-side in tall, squared-off blades of grass with dragonflies dive-bombing into one of them." Now that's just the sort of unbiased journalism New Yorkers have come to expect from a respected news source like The Post.

Is this dumb or what? Granted, in a vacuum, some parallels between the world trade center attack and the ad can be drawn: the two towering cups, the sinister-looking winged thing heading straight towards them, the unfortunate use of the word "collapse." Still, this reaction is so overblown. I mean, haven't advertisers given up on the whole subliminal messaging in advertising thing since the demise of Joe Camel? One wonders what stopped The Post and other offended parties from searching for tiny portraits of Osama Bin Laden hidden in the drinks' ice crystals.

All in all, even though the removal of 3,000 posters was surely a pain in Starbucks' butt, it could have been a lot worse. They could have chosen to go with that "Let's Roll" sticky bun campaign.

Door to Door Whore?
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Soap Sampling Makes Me Feel So Dirty
Last year, The Economist magazine went pro logo. In a direct response to Naomi Klein's anti-globalization handbook, No Logo, the influential mag made "the case for brands," contending that "Far from being instruments of oppression, they make firms accountable to consumers."

Would Adam Pereira's customers agree? The cooking fuel distributor works for Ultragaz SA, delivering 30-pound "balloons" of butane and propane to Brazilian households, according to a 6/10 Wall Street Journal piece (Brazil's Gasboys Deliver Fuel and Free Samples by Miriam Jordan). Besides the butane, Pereira also parcels out brands. He's an affable guy who knows his customers well. He's liked and trusted by them. Viral marketers would refer to Pereira as an influencer, one who not only spurs word-of-mouth promotion, but validates the message being spread. His seal of approval is priceless to marketers vying for that holy grail of brand marketing: household name status.

Of course, sought after more than the endorsement of respected influencers like Pereira are the markets themselves, the would-be consumers. Not only can they help establish a once-unrecognized brand in a new region or re-trench a brand that's fallen from favor, they can help test products still in the works. Plus, because the delivery system is already in place, overhead is low.

Huge packaged goods firms that make everything from deodorant to diapers, including Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Nestle, are doin' it. And firms like Ultragaz make out pretty well because of it. Since 1995, the Royal Dutch/Shell division has been charging manufacturers such as Sara Lee five cents to distribute each unit, but that measly payment's value extends far beyond a nickel. In the Journal article Ultragaz's marketing manager, Valdir Righetti, ensures that Ultragaz is not in the sample distribution business; however, pairing with Sara Lee and other product marketers, "improves our relationship with our customers. It's like we're giving them a present."

Does it work? It's difficult to determine, but it probably doesn't hurt. After aligning with Ultragaz, "Colgate-Palmolive saw sales of its antibacterial soap, Protex, jump threefold," according to the story, and Sara Lee's market share has jumped 13% since Ultragaz has been distributing its Phebo soap.

Indeed, Klein's "No Logo" acknowledges these marketing strategies, stating. "…companies are forever on the prowl for creative new ways to build and strengthen their brand images…. It requires an endless parade of brand extensions, continuously renewed imagery for marketing and, most of all, fresh new spaces to disseminate the brand's idea of itself."

It also takes willing participants. Pereira and his customers fit the bill. Coming across as quite the happy huckster in the Journal feature, Pereira pours on the charm when pitching products like Phebo. "Here's a little gift for you," he says to a woman he calls "princess," "It's a marvelous new Phebo product."

It's all very Fuller brush man. This sort of thing would never fly in parts of Europe or North America where folks are much more marketing savvy. In those places, the typical response to Pereira's cheery endorsement of the "marvelous" product might be, "Yeah, what's so great about it?"

The question is, because he and his customers may be more naïve when it comes to marketing tactics, does this mean they're being duped somehow, or used?

The consumers aren't. If they don't want to buy Phebo they don't have to. They don't even have to take the giveaways. Chances are, they're pleased to receive the branded product samples. For one, they're an added bonus. More important, as The Economist noted in its pro logo paean, because of their uniformity and continuity, brands can be relied upon; they also must remain accountable to their consumers or risk a drop in sales. In some ways, this gives the consumer the upper hand.

The answer is more murky when it comes to sample distributors like Pereira. As noted in the article, even though he seems so enthusiastic about it, he doesn't get paid any extra pay for handing out soap. Does he genuinely think it's marvelous? The fact that a reporter was following him around that day may have fueled his friendly salesmanship fire. I'd venture to guess most "gasboys" aren't putting much effort into pushing the products. Still, does their participation make the product deliverers pawns in this branding game?

It could be, but chances are, if they want to keep their jobs, they don't have much of a choice. Hey, at least their customers won't smell.