The gentai art of cucumber cool?

I read an interesting story in BusinessWeek magazine. In Japan Pepsi launched a line extension called Pepsi Ice Cucumber. Unlike the usual flavoured cola drinks the cucumber variant isn't brown. It is a pale green. While gaijin palates might find that a perfectly revolting concept but the Japanese chug-a-lugged 4.8 million bottles of the stuff in two weeks. Stock sold out. You'd think that with such a hit on their hands Pepsi would be shouting 'Banzai!' and going for broke…

Nope. They killed it. According to a Suntory spokesperson "The value of Ice Cucumber is that it's gone already." The product was a marketing ploy to create buzz. The Japanese have a name for this: gentei (limited edition). For Pepsi the buzz around the variant helped to invigorate interest in the brand in a cluttered and hotly contested market.

The Japanese are obviously very receptive to novelty but the obvious question is how the gentei phenomenon affects the core brand. What does Pepsi 'mean' to consumers who don't know what happens next. It seems to me something akin to retailers who are always in Sale mode (Briscoes homewares for example). Do we become conditioned to wait until deep discounts are offered before committing to purchases?

For Pepsi to generate an intense buzz then withdraw the product obviously impacts on traditional ideas about 'loyalty'. The Businessweek article quotes a Mars Japan spokesperson "If you do it too much, [consumers will] forget why they are purchasing the brand…"

Comments

Addict-o-matic

A cool resource for you to try. Aggregates search topics from a number of sources. Thanks to Brand DNA (again) for the heads-up.

Johnny Bunko competiton

The Great Johnny Bunko Challenge from DHP on Vimeo . There's a young chap in Indiana, one Alec Quig , who has written to me about creating a career based on a polymathic degree, from which he has recently graduated. He's an interesting young man and his concerns about going forward in life are the anxieties we all face at crossroads in our lives when we are forced to make choices. Dan Pink's latest book The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You'll Ever Need might help: "From a New York Times, BusinessWeek, and Washington Post bestselling author comes a first-of-its- kind career guide for a new generation of job seekers.There's never been a career guide like it.the fully illustrated story (ingeniously told in Manga form) of a young Everyman just out of college who lands his first job. Johnny Bunko is new to parachute company Boggs Corp., and he stumbles through his early days as a working stiff until a crisis prompts him to find a new job. St

Sexist Advertising and stereotypes

Advertising lives in the short-form world. Because mass media is so expensive the 30 second commercial is conventional and because there is so much clutter simplified signals are essential to 'cut through'. One form of communication short-hand used as a default is the stereotype - "A stereotype can be a conventional and oversimplified conception, opinion, or image, based on the assumption that there are attributes that members of the "other group" have in common. Stereotypes are sometimes formed by a previous illusory correlation, a false association between two variables that are loosely correlated if correlated at all. Though generally viewed as negative perceptions, stereotypes may be either positive or negative in tone." In the 1950's and 60's when men dominated advertising stereotypical impressions of women as inferior or subservient were not only commonplace but usual. It was normal to show women as housekeepers, largely because most wer

ThoughtSpurs

Search This Blog