aggienaut | 6 of 30 - Marketting Backfires (Reply)

   Today in Theories of Persuasion we had to form groups, decide on something to market and the target audience, write this down, trade with another group, decide how we would market what they came up with.
   Of course my first impulse was "I want to be an asshole and give some other group something like "a new brand of landmines to market to new age female yuppies."* Toward this end it immediately occured to me that Vice Chief Justice Daniel Raff who I had class with, would probably also be enthusiastic about being an asshole.
   Sure enough, when I got to him he was already plotting. His incredibly nefarious plot: make the other group market George W. Bush. How evil! To add to the evil, I knew that super liberal Jim "I'm going to change my middle name to ACLU" Schwab was in the class and resolved to stick him with the job of marketing GWB. Unfortunately however Dan's liberal female friend thought this was too evil so we spent much time debating it. So much so that by the time we were ready to exchange with another group, all the other groups had exchanged already... so we had to do our own!! At least we were able to cause severe angst to the liberal girl in our own group.

   It ended up not being so bad though. To market GWB to youth we resolved to show him snowboarding and playing other vigorous sports. Also we decided to have like the IPOD commercial, but the silhuette person in the ipod commercial would fade in to reveal: its GWB!! Rocking out! Then maybe he'd say "its been me all along muahahaha!" while putting his pinky up to his mouth. Or not.
   After some consideration we decided the song involved would be Gwen Stefani - Holla Back Girl. "Iraq is bananas/ I-raq is banan-as/ b-a-n-a-n-a-s!!"
   To market to the nonheterosexual crowd without offending his conservative base, we'd use footage of him doing ambiguous activities with other men, like hanging out in the spa in speedos.
   The other goal was to get conservatives out to vote, so we decided just to show old people voting and portray voting as the frasky and exciting conservative thing to do.

   And to get the liberals who hate his guts on board, we'd show him about to die, like about to step on a land mine or walk into a jet engine intake, only to get distracted at the last minute and stop walking. Hopefully the liberals will be so excited with ancitipation that Bush was about to become mulch, that they would become susceptable to the messege of the advertising campaign... which would secretly be pro-bush! Now how's that for brilliant marketing sauce? I should go into marketing asap. (=

*In 12th grade econ in an assignment where we had to work in pairs and make up a country and its economy, I created an island nation that specialized in making and exporting land-mines, much to the angst of my partner, local cheerleader Stephanie Ulrich.