10 September 2009

Schweppes Solo: Are public pavements fair game for marketers?

Looks like the members of a Schweppes “street marketing” team are taking the term literally when it comes to the Solo brand’s “Game On” football (soccer) promotion. A series of bright yellow stenciled logos appeared this week on the pavement in the busy Glenferrie Road shopping strip in the Melbourne suburb of Hawthorn, frequented by thousands of students from Swinburne University and nearby secondary schools.

Just as the original “Solo Man” in the iconic 1980s TV commercials dribbled lemon drink down his chin and chest as he “cracked a Solo”, the corporate graffitists have dribbled yellow paint along the footpath and even cleared the nozzles of their spray cans in the gutters in multiple locations.

Are footpaths and pavements “fair game” for advertisers? What if one of Solo’s competitors (e.g. the Coca-Cola Company’s Lift brand) decided to come along and spray over the Solo stencils? Or tried to outgun them by spraying two or three times the number of Lift logos in the same stretch of the shopping strip? Where might it all end?

And what about the effect on consumer sentiment towards the Solo brand?

My immediate reaction makes me think that the sloppiness and intrusiveness of the stenciling work does the Solo brand no favours.

Posted via email from qbrand's posterous

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