We begin this week on familiar ground: with begging people to leave all things Hitler out of their marketing campaigns. Hitler does not work, retailers. Not with handbags. Not with jewelry. Not with coffee creamer. And most certainly not with toys. A toy manufacture in Poland has apparently not gotten the memo, because it’s standing by its decision to sell smiling toy Nazi figures driving miniature Third Reich tanks and trunks. Because hey, who wouldn’t want their kid playing with what appears to be — honest to God — a grinning SS officer brandishing a machine gun as he peers out of a Panzer? Because no siree, there’s nothing at all creepy and inappropriate about that.
Lest you think that creepy and inappropriate are limited to Europe, we have a strip club play set, courtesy of a Chicago company that makes custom Lego pieces. The Foxy Blox play set sells for $275 includes a stripper pole, stripper figures and more horror than we can describe in a paragraph.
Not to be outdone on the bad taste front, a brewery has created a Bavarian Black lager and is using the slogan “You’ll be a SLAVE to the FLAVOR” to sell it. You have to wonder why someone selling an allegedly edible product would roll out a marketing campaign that essentially tells people, “We know nothing about good taste.” In this instance, the brewer is insisting that critics have misread the slogan — it’s not about slavery, the brewer insists, why, it’s about the S&M scene! And he points to the beer glasses featuring a dominatrix and her captive as proof.
Our wholly inadvertent theme of Marketing: Who Knew it Was So Hard? continues with a nice tweedy jacket that inexplicably has been engineered to smell like booze. Specifically, whiskey. It’s supposed to show that you are a gentlemen of sophistication and elegance, but we doubt that’s the effect it will have on any cop who pulls you over. Or your boss. Or your family. Or anyone, really. We’ve all encountered people who smell like booze, and is “sophisticated” really the word that comes to mind when you deal with them? Not to mention that if you truly want to reek of booze, buying what appears to be a very spendy piece of clothing is not a particularly cost-effective way to do it.
Moving on to a marketing campaign that’s strange but that won’t make you want to weep for humanity, we have these adorable marshmallows shaped like kittens. See how easy that is, retailers? These are probably mildly disturbing when they start to melt into your cocoa — do you really want to see a kitty dissolve before your eyes? — but we can all agree that this is far less disturbing than, say, marshmallow Nazis. (Which as of this writing do no exist, but you know — you know — it’s just a matter of time.)
We end with some things that manage to be both peculiar and adorable. Unsurprisingly, these things involve cats. First we have weird photos of cats sitting on glass, and let the record show that we sympathize with the animals — no one and no thing looks good photographed like that. And then we have cats sleeping in weird positions and managing to look very happy. We assume they’re dreaming of a world in which toy strip clubs don’t exist.
December 13, 2014 7:26 AM
