Caboose Cut Loose

I was out at dinner with a group of friends recently, when a mate turned to me and said “what is with the Sprite campaign?”. For anyone who hasn’t seen it around the place over the last 12 months or so, the Coca-Cola product has taken over numerous city billboards and bus stops, marketing their product with the “truth”.

Headlines for these ads include “Drinking Sprite won’t make you cooler” and “Your parents still do it”.

Sprite isn’t the first product out there to engage in self-slandering promotions. Australian Gen-Y worshipped radio station Nova launched campaigns about how bad their radio station is, shortly after launching the station itself. They frequently employ doctored (and original) clips of celebrities defaming the station, saying things like they’d “rather stand in front of a moving bus than listen to Nova”.

 So as my friend asked: why do they do it? Aren’t they meant to be telling us that their products are good?

 As far as I could see to explain, there are a few reasons why these guys are doing it.

 1. Gen Y typically doesn’t like being told what is “cool”. They are all about making judgement for themselves, and thinking they create their own image, are part of their own culture, and don’t conform to marketing.

 This is largely a crock. Yes they think that… but how many emo kids swarming around your local CBD think that they are “expressing themselves” and being “unique”. There wasn’t a TV spot saying, “Dress like a Muppet heading to a Manson concert” (this is a topic for a whole other blog!). They aren’t unique, and it certainly wasn’t them who decided that was the cool way to dress.

Gen Y is more likely to back the underdog around. Even though “Sprite” is produced in the same factory as the market leader “Coke” – the branding of it is being positioned to appeal to the values of today’s market.

 2. It’s refreshing to hear the cold hard truth. It’s amazing what advertisers would have you believe are the positive side effects of drinking brand A over identical brand B. Humans have evolved over the last hundred years to now have in built “crap detectors”. Ad’s now days are trying to be less transparent then their predecessors.

 If this particular billboard had said “Drinking Sprite will make you popular”, aside from it being rejected by the Advertising Standards Bureau for false advertising, no one would really pay attention. We are so used to seeing the benefit of every product that you just don’t pay attention anymore.

 3. Point number three – not only does it get you to notice it… it gets people talking about it. If old mate mister (or ms) account strategy and planning for Sprite reads this to find not only did someone notice it, but they brought it up for discussion at a dinner table of 10 people… from there someone blogged about it… well I dare say they’ll be calling Bonds for a fresh shipment of tighty whities.

So if you can’t honestly say what your product WILL do better than any other – maybe think about what it WON’T. I’ll end this with one of my favourite business positioning statements of all time. The Norman Hotel, a steakhouse in Brisbane advertises itself as “Brisbane’s WORST Vegetarian Restaurant”.

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