Marketing Intelligence by Iain Johnston

3. “Satan fronts church campaign” <checks to see if it is 1st of April, then realises its about a church in Detroit, so anything’s possible>

Looking at the second one above, it does of course take courage and commitment to spend scarce marketing dollars advertising against someone who is trying to sell your products. Credit to Dermalogica for that. It’s good to have principles. I’m one of the first people to applaud a business that has a strong sense of its brand and how to protect it.

However, this for me smells like old style advertising. The sort of advertising we used to have in markets where you could control things. Where you could prevent people getting messages which didn’t tell your story. Advertising from the age before the internet, mobile media and self-forming user communities. The Stone Age in other words.

I can remember at business school hearing about the rules for price discrimination. One of them was you have to be able to build strong and defensible barriers between groups of consumers that you want to screw discriminate between. It is essential that in price discrimination, the different buyers have incomplete knowledge and can’t talk to each other. In classical economics terms, an imperfect market. The sort of markets that hardly exist anymore.

I feel for Dermalogica’s customers. Wonder if they’re thinking “why can’t I buy this product at Boots if it suits me?”.

A bit like when consumers find out the marketing they’ve been peddled is bollox. Or even very high quality and genuinely intentioned innovation gets twisted on receipt. Customers become cynical, they distrust the brand, and they rebell against the company. Like when this piece of brilliance, spawned these two (and many other) parodies.

But the guy from the third piece explains a pragmatic approach. In answer to the question “why is the church promoting Satan?”, Adam Dorbland, the church’s youth pastor, said that ‘Jesus wants us to be creative’ and ‘use whatever it takes to reach people’.”

All good stuff, but only if the message is rooted in fact, is based on some fundamental truth.

By taking an ad out to shout to the world they’re in the middle of a row with an influential distributor, Dermalogica are in an interesting position.

Why aren’t they focusing on their own positive agenda about the brilliance of the product, rather than airing their dirty linen in public? It could of course be another bit of “any publicity is good publicity” routine. And the risible £500 reward they are offering to distributors who blab on how Boots are getting hold of their product has all the hallmarks of a stunt.

But focus on the consumer. The company wants the consumer to think the product is exclusive, only available through high-end Spas and the like. But I think consumers like choice, and they resent restrictions, they want to be treated as grown-ups. So the ads are just as likely to drive more traffic to Boots stores. Hope that’s what Dermalogica intended, but I suspect not.

I’m not sure I would want to reach my customers with the message that I don’t trust them to make informed decisions.