CHAPTER 5
Advertising Blunders IT’S ALL ABOUT IMAGE
has floated around business schools about how the Gerber Company wrecked any chances it might have had of selling its line of baby foods in sub-Saharan Africa. According to the yarn, Gerber spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get the word out about its product. But the company was disappointed by an almost total lack of sales there. The management team discovered that, because of the region’s high rate of illiteracy, consumers had come to expect that whatever image appears on a container, box, or jar is a literal depiction of the contents inside. The illiteracy rate was particularly high among women—the very target consumer Gerber wanted to reach. The Gerber jar is adorned with its picture of a cute, white baby. In other words, Gerber found itself, unwittingly, encouraging young mothers in Kenya and Botswana to feed their children food made from baby parts. While fictitious, the story does have a lesson: Advertising is all about image, and image is everything. Just ask the Swiss…
FOR YEARS, AN APOCRYPHAL STORY
Switzerland Sends in the Moo-rines Many envision Switzerland as a composite of lush Alpine meadows inhabited by milk cows tended by hearty militia dairymen in lederhosen who yodel away the hours as they carve chocolate cuckoo clocks. They sit on a rock, whittling with high-quality Swiss Army pocket knives and their inebriated St. Bernard beside them. All the while, they maintain a stoic neutrality. The somewhat inclusive, if not idiosyncratic, Swiss idyll took a heavy hit in the late 1990s when the harsh spotlight of history shone into some unexplored corners. The country’s banking industry had been criticized in the past for actively squirreling away huge sums of money for the Nazis during World War II. The Swiss government had reportedly turned a blind eye to the reports and made a national sport of bureaucratically dragging its feet in returning the money of Holocaust victims to their families. Switzerland had an image problem, particularly in the US, where many Holocaust survivors relocated after the war. What to do? The answer was obvious. As Switzerland doesn’t have a Marine Corps, the answer was to send in the cows. Fiberglass cows, that is. Fifty of them, shipped to New York City in the fall of 1999, where they would be the focus of a marketing and advertising campaign. Thus began an officially sanctioned “cow parade”—to reclaim Switzerland’s international reputation as the laugh-a-minute, fun capital of Europe. The shrewd plan would deposit life-size and mass-produced cows at public schools throughout
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