We Are What We Market
My heart sank as soon as I caught sight of the Colonel wearing a Santa hat.
The life-sized wooden statue outside the Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in Mitaka had always been a source of bemusement before. That night, however, on a Christmas Eve 1987 spent in Japan — farther away from home than I’d ever been before — it got under my skin.
The statue was a perfect example of the way the Japanese so often inflated the symbols of American marketing to iconic status — quaintly, to be sure, but unnervingly so to an American who wanted his nation to stand for so much more than Levi’s jeans or Coca-Cola. (By the way, the soda giant’s popular “I Feel Coke and Sound Special” campaign was ubiquitous at the time; taglines didn’t have to make sense, they just had to be in English.)
I hopped off my bike and passed the Colonel without incident to enter the store. I strode to the counter and ordered the Grazing Pack, a special value meal that, unbeknownst to me, was being marketed as the perfect dinner solution for a family of four. (I’m sorry, but I don’t consider four little pieces of chicken, a few biscuits, and a little cole slaw overly ambitious.)
The angelically tempered girl behind the cash register hesitated. She looked past me to verify that I was, in fact, alone before asking me to repeat the order. When I said Grazing Pack again she began to giggle, then climbed up on the counter and pointed to the menu photo above her head. “This?” she asked. “You want this?”
Naturally, I no longer did, but was far too humiliated to say so. I nodded.
She excused herself politely — in Japan, clerks remain polite even if you set the store on fire — but I could hear her lose control back in the kitchen. “There’s a foreigner out there who just ordered a Grazing Pack for himself,” she yelled. Shouts of disbelief were followed by other angelic faces peering from the doorway to get a look at the gluttonous American.
I got my order and sat down. There wasn’t a single other patron in the restaurant, but I was kept company by staff members checking on my progress. There were cheers when the last one proclaimed the Pack fully conquered, and all five of them emerged proudly to offer a farewell round of applause.
I went outside to retrieve my bike. There was the Colonel, smug, silent. As I rode past, I kicked him over into the street.
Brush With History
One of the pleasant surprises I uncovered while researching this issue was that my surname is a part of promotion history. I found that out in PROMO’s April 1989 issue, although the incident to which it relates actually occurred 12 years earlier.
In 1977, the feds undertook a sting operation in New York in their never-ending battle against coupon fraud (an extremely important topic during the magazine’s formative years). So they ran a fake FSI in three metro papers, creating a fictitious product to promote within the ad: Breen Detergent.
The offer drew 2,100 fraudulent claims from 42 states, and ultimately led to 223 arrests. The product’s faux tagline, “Cleans Away Dirt and Grime,” proved to be true in so much deeper a way.
It’s enough to make a guy proud.
Winning Memories
When PROMO made a call for reader recollections to help us review the last 15 years, we promised an unnamed prize to the person who presented ‘our favorite submission.’ Congratulations to Tom Kettler, creative director at Einson Freeman, who earned a $100 gift certificate to the Sharper Image for the following gem:
In 1987, I mistook Einson Freeman for Einstein Moomjy and pulled in to buy a carpet. Today, I’m the agency’s creative director.
In my defense, the logos looked kind of similar — and they were right next door to one another on Route 17 in Paramus, NJ. (Little did I know I had just stumbled upon the grand-daddy of promotion agencies.)
Since then, I’ve come to appreciate promotion for what it is: the most well-rounded, visionary, brand-building, needle-moving marketing discipline around. Sometimes I get teary-eyed for the mile-high image makers who never get to experience how consumers actually interact with their brands. Ironically, they probably pity me just the same. “Poor chap only gets to write lines like ‘buy one, get one’ and ‘free’ on things like FSIs and tear-pads.”
Promotion is where the rubber meets the road. And the road is wherever brands cross paths with (the right) consumers. You’ve got to love an industry that takes you from the malls to the bars to the boardroom to the Web to the cereal aisle all in one day.
