Is fooling your customers a good longterm strategy?
Posted by Steffen Stäuber
Diamond Shreddies – I already saw this case when I scrolled down the cannes lions winners site some time ago, but it didn´t seemed that interesting to me to blog about. (and I don´t understand why it had won?)
But anyway, a few days ago I stumbled into it on youtube and had a closer look.
What fascinated me about it, was not the case itself…
…they only did some standard integrated campaign stuff – with viral videos, a website, tv spots and print ads (uuuuuhhhh…boring).
No, the interesting thing were the reactions from the people to this campaign. A lot of people responded with their own video to comment on this piece of advertising.
Video comments like this one:
This video got 26.301 views and over 337 comments!!! And they all ask the same question.
“Are the people out there that dumb???”
But unfortunately this whole campaign is based on fooling consumers. I mean…ok…I work in advertising myself and I know that we always try to fool or let´s call it “to convince” people in some way or another but this Diamond Shreddie thing is going way too far!
Not all ad guys seem to agree with me (watch this post), but this campaign really scares me!
And even if the company sold some more cereals at the beginning I`m sure that this is not a good long term strategy! Because if someone makes fun of me, I will either ignore him or punch him right in the face.
And people will also do this with the brand. And all the negative buzz going on online will harm the brand more than they sold with this stupid campaign. (hopefully)
But this is only my opinion, and I would love to discuss about this campaign, do you think the people out there are all pricks?…so if you have an opinion, just leave a comment or write a mail.
Cheers
Tags: advertising, canadian marketing association, cannadian marketing blog, cannes lions, cma, Diamond Shreddies, Diamond Shreddies campaign, fooling, KRC588, negative buzz, Ogilvy and Mather, video comments, viral videos, youtube