Dude, that was a great marketing idea! I’ve often said to myself, “Self, as soon as you manage to kick this heroin habit, you should reward yourself with a luxury cruise. But which cruise line would be best for the occasion?” Now I know!
Sunshine, NurseCarmen, and others – don’t you find that after the marketing people do all their psychology and data mining and brain storming and everything else, the upper-level management folks come in and put their grubby fingerprints on everything?
HowieRyenolds
You are simply wrong. The point of that ad is to sell jeans to people who like the song “Fortunate Son.”
An lot of ads these days, like the car ad with a fairly obscure Nick Drake song, use “cool” songs to appeal to “cool” people. Nothing says “cruises aren’t for shriveled old people, they’re about wild debauchery and sex!” like an Iggy Pop tune. Additionally, it helps that the people who own these catalogues (sometimes David Bowie) are aggressively marketing the songs to the ad companies.
Nonetheless, marketing degrees are worthless. Almost all bachelors degrees are worthless. Most people with most undergrad degrees would be better at doing whatever they do with more literature, math, and science.
j.c., re: grubby-fingered management. That happened a lot when I worked at Interbrand, and it truly pissed me off. After weeding out a shortlist of ten final choices from over a thousand product names we’d created, then sending the list to a network of offices all over the world for language and cultural checks, one of the sales managers would inevitably look at our final list, say “I really like the letter Z,” or some such nonsense, and add his own suggestion just before handing it over to the client. And if a client ever asked which one he recommended, guess which name got put forward?
Since this is precisely how Kanebo cosmetics ended up putting Blow Silk Shampoo on the market, it could also be the cause behind Uncrustables.
Since Uncrustables are aimed at kids, the name is hardly stupid. It’s dramatic, meaningless and somewhat memorable. Most products aimed at kids appear extraordinary dumb to adults.
But I have to agree that marketing degrees are pointless and you could probably learn more in a week’s actual work than in 4 years of studying marketing. (Of course that’s why so many business-oriented degrees have a commercial placement as a major component so that you might at least learn something of value).
Considering what Iggy Pop looks like these days, I think it’s more like “cruises aren’t for shriveled old people, they’re for shriveled old people who enjoy wild debauchery and sex!”
Which is still a pretty good marketing message.
Proof that marketing is effective: bottled water.
We live in a country with the largest, cheapest, safest, most easily accessible supply of potable water in the history of mankind, yet a multi-billion dollar industry has risen up around selling the same product in a medium that is less convenient, with lower quality standards, and for hundreds of times the price.
That, my friends, is pure genius.
Sorry, but I have to chime in on this one. I have a Biology undergraduate degree and a marketing MBA from a top 20 university. Marketing is all about developing the sales message and figuring out what customers want. It might shock you to learn that I do this for the military right now, because in the grand scheme of things, they are consumers to, and can buy IT services from a number of vendors which all look alike. So I look at what’s important to the customer - past performance, reliability, responsiveness, and most important of all, security. Then I look at how the competition does it and focus our services to say these messages in a way that’s different than what they do.
Sounds stupid I know, but trust me, it’s harder than it looks, and it is a lot of art rather than skill. Think anyone can do it? Apparently not well if we’re all laughing at ‘Uncrustables’. The truth is, people THINK anyone can do it and then when they try to do the research, generate copy, create graphics, and pull it all together with a marketing plan and balanced budget they suddenly realize it’s a hell of a lot harder than it looks. In fact, most people do just the opposite of differentiating their product. They say “Gee, my competitor is selling well, so I guess I should copy what they’re doing”. Then all the customer knows is that there is the REAL brand (the competitor) and your crappy knock-off. That may work for generic drugs, but it sure doesn’t work in my business.
I think in most jobs where you’re NOT a higher-up, the execs always want to get their hands all over anything you’re doing. I work in marketing for a corporate law firm (yes, even law firms need marketing departments), and we’re currently working on a rollout of a new website & marketing materials. Now, I’m supposedly the project manager for all these marketing materials; however, our director, my manager and I got into an argument over a COMMA. One comma in an obscure paragraph. Which lasted for the better part of an entire DAY. I think you’ll find that, unless your job doesn’t require to you to interact with people, you’ll meet tons of individuals like this who basically just like to assert their power and “superior knowledge” over stupid things. And, yes, the whole issue would not have lasted more than a couple of hours if I had just conceded, but I’m also required to write by Associated Press guidelines. If one attorney sees that I’ve messed up something, anything, in these materials, I could have up to 300 people upset about it and come down on me or my manager.
And as for marketing degrees, I think it depends upon where you are on the food chain. I have an archaeology degree, a spanish degree and a masters in linguistics. The only time I use my linguistics master is to translate docs into Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese & Catalan. Other than that, all these degrees are completely useless to me. In fact, my masters is more of a liability than anything else.
It seems to me the majority of the discussion in this thread is centered around companies that market to consumers. There is a huge contingent of marketing professionals that work in business to business marketing.
I have an undergraduate degree in Mechanical Engineering and earned an MBA in Marketing after several years in the workplace. I am a Marketing Manager for a company who sells products to other companies. I can tell you that NONE of my time is spent on advertising and very little is spent on literature or brochures.
I am sure every company is different, but my position is responsible for the growth and profitability of my market segment. My job consists of setting the strategy of our sales and R&D departments in order to best position my company to acquire profitable business.
My many duties are keeping up with market trends, analyzing my companies strengths and weaknesses, determining which markets and customers to penetrate, keeping an eye on my competition, pricing new and current business, analyzing new technologies and determining which developmental projects (new products) we should be working on.
Many employees who have marketing in their title can best be described as business managers or business development professionals.
I have had many jobs during my career and I can tell you this one is by far the most challenging. I am basically running my own business and am held accountable for the results. I make very tough decisions every day that may change the direction of my segment for years to come.
To paint the marketing profession with such a wide brush is completely unfair.
Somewhat on the topic here are some products that the marketers and ad agencies tried very hard to sell but never got the message across to me:
-Beer commercials. Unless it’s working subliminaly on me they just don’t land thier brand. Sure there’s bud-weis-er but besides that there are a plethora of beer ads that I can recall, but I can’t recall what beer they are for. Girls fighting in the pond over some beer, beats me what beer it’s for.
-Lee Jeans. I absolutely loved the Buddy Lee commercials. Do I own any Lee jeans, no. Have I ever tried them on, no. Have I ever wanted to check them out, no.
-Truck commercials. Same problem as the beer. I can probably explain dozens of pickup truck commercials to you but could not tell you what brands they were for. They sure can drive up a pile of bricks though.
Do ad firms and marketers fail to sell the product by making a sharp looking memorable commercial but forget to land the brand??
Hampshire I think there’s a joke about a cleo-winning ad never selling anything. But that’s just a joke.
Anyone know how well Uncrustables are doing?
Dear lord, overlyverbose, who requires you to write by AP guidelines? What a nightmare.
How about networking products named “IP Anywhere” here and here. The name so good two companies decided to use it.
Don’t even get me started. It’s like pulling teeth to get some of these guys to pare things down so people will actually read them. God forbid I try making them use proper grammar. I can’t even count the days, weeks, I’ve spent going over all this crap with that stupid AP Stylebook. I nearly have the whole thing memorized.