If you're going to try selling a cigarette with the just-plain-awful name of Spuds, the marketing department must get creative.
Step one, find yourself a niche market not currently being served. Since your cigarettes are menthols, how about selling them to people with colds, the flu or other congestion and breathing-impairing ailments. Hell, Vicks is making a mint off of Vap-o-Rub, right? Best part is that this audience will not even realize if your cigarettes smell and taste like a sewage treatment plant in July. Score!
Second, what are two of the most important two words in marketing? That's right, "Sex Sells". This product is pretty bad, so we have to really amp up that angle. Okay, here's what we do. We get renowned girlie artist E. Simms Campbell to draw up a couple of strippers, clad only in their working clothes, and have them refer obliquely to oral sex, and even (can we get away with this, J.B.?) give the more sophisticated male libido the impression that they might be *gasp* lesbos!
When I was a kid I'd see Spuds ads in old magazines and, knowing nothing about cigarettes, figured they were made from potatoes.
ReplyDeleteWho knows? Maybe they actually were made of potatoes. You know, like Spudnuts, except they're not doughnuts, they're cigarettes. Maybe they should have called them Spudarettes, or Potatoettes.
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