Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Bi-polar brands.

It's no picnic growing up with a bi-polar parent. You never know what to expect, if you're going to get hugged or thwacked in the head with a rolled-up National Geographic. Yet most of the brands we interact with are as bi-polar as Joan Crawford on a dark day.

Years ago I worked on the H-P account. Man, their advertising was beautiful. Then you turned to one of their FSIs. It looked like that old horror movie, "Revenge of the Rat's Breakfast." Likewise, as my blogosphere friend Bob Hoffman points out in his wonderful blog The Ad Contrarian http://adcontrarian.blogspot.com/ points out, all is sweetness and light in fast-food advertising, but step into a restaurant and welcome to Surly-ville.

Think GM for a second. How disconnected the buying experience was from their spots. Oh, Hal Riney challenged that for a while with their work on Saturn--the best car advertising since VW, but they were summarily dismissed and GM reverted to form--that is the form of your local neighborhood robber baron.

No big point here but to propagate the phrase that pays--bi-polar brands. If you have one or work for one buy your funeral garb now.

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