Marketing with knobs on!

I took this picture in Prague airport a few years back and it got me thinking. First, the building (the Page TV Tower) in the ad really is very ugly. The outside tubes actually have large metallic, silver babies crawling up and down them. Second, it is in a difficult location to reach and third, the entrance fee is ridiculously high. And yet... I went. Why?

Well, the ad is great. It not only boasts about being ugly, but the cherry on the cake is that it claims to be... the second ugliest. Brilliant. Marketing at its most effective. I even went online afterwards to find out where the ugliest building was. The ad had worked.

This type of shock advertising sort of all began with the Benetton baby posters. If you don't know what they looked like, have a Google. It's worth it.

Marketing like this is something different. Something deliciously outrageous and what some liberated people call anti-marketing.

So, what is anti-marketing at its most basic and understandable? I say this because if you ask academics and sales people, you will get very different answers. The academic will wax lyrical about anti-foundationalism, de-deferentiation, fragmentation and even hyper-reality. Wonderful stuff. He or she may even throw in pastiche and parody.

The sales person will simply say: it's OK to poke fun at your own product or even say bad stuff about it. If you can provoke a reaction, you will be remembered... and that's what it's all about.

On a very simplistic level, it's reverse psychology mixed with pots of humour. Put those two together and you have a pretty good anti-marketing campaign.

It all revolves around the truth, of course, - the hinge of most marketing and anti-marketing campaigns nowadays. Why? Well, it's not because we've all suddenly discovered a conscience. Of course not. It's simply because of the power of the internet - you can't peddle lies or half-truths anymore. The age of Trip Advisor is here. We don't listen to what sales people say about their own products anymore, because traditionally they only ever said the good stuff. We listen to our peers and, if you see that someone has only given a product one or two stars, you move on. Sale lost.

So... how do marketing and sales people react to this turning of the tables? Well, they start by blurring the battlefield. Instead of doing what they've always done, they roll over and and do wildly silly things. First, they exaggerate... not how good they are, but how bad! It's the truth with knobs on! More than the truth. Something a lot more amazing. People always love this, because bad always sounds much more honest than good.

This is where the fun really starts.

Take Marmite. Their marketing team actually admits that loads of people hate their product. Their posters even have people drowning in pools of the brown stuff, with yuk written all over their faces. Then there's Yorkie chocolate biscuits. They actually ran a campaign a few years ago saying it was a chocolate bar NOT for girls. Sales rocketed, as girls bought the biscuit as a protest. And then there's French Connection, the clothes retailer. They were on a downward curve until some bright marketing spark came up with the controversial FCUK facelift. Dangerous but clever. It instantly became cool and had buckets of street-cred to have the 'f' word all over your front. Their sales curve started rising again.

Guinness spent millions on ads, which did not even mention the drink or show any pictures of it - just a collection of disjointed black and white images of people surfing in a rough sea, accompanied by some daft poetry. But it was remembered and now anything black and white is associated with Guinness. They didn't bother with their product. It didn't matter. Forget selling it. Forget the truth. Forget saying how good it tastes. Just give the customer a few arty images and the semblance of a story. And... it worked, because it was different. Odd. Weird. Rememberable.

Anti-marketing may be seen as just another way of relieving us of our money, but it runs deeper. It's a response to the growing power of the customer where, to get the sale, you have to be more creative, more artistic, and even more humorous, with truth and honesty hovering like frowning angels in the background. It has evolved from simply the selling of a product. People want more nowadays. They need more. There's just far too much choice. To get noticed you have to be different. Unique. Risky. Outrageous. Dangerous. Self-deprecating. Plain silly.

And that's why I love the poster of the Prague TV Tower with its crawling babies.