Of course it’s a perfectly natural reaction to think that we aren’t influenced by advertising at all – “we’re all too clever to be suckered into that”, “a complete waste of money”.
But such thinking is, of course, complete bollocks.
Although there is little more irritating and mind-numbingly dull as a Procter & Gamble washing powder commercial repeated ad nauseum, they obviously work very well as, otherwise, they wouldn’t keep pumping money into variations on the same theme decade after decade.
If advertising didn’t work, then we’d all be shopping at Aldi and Lidl, buying non-name groceries and driving Hyundais … well actually, I do drive a Hyundai, but only because I loathe cars with a passion (I can’t even remember what sort of Hyundai it is – it’s just a silvery-blue one) and it’s not mine anyway – I just rent it so that I can give the keys back to the company when some mad minibus driver takes a wing off it.
But this is beside the point, because we are all slaves to advertising whether we admit it or not. Want some proof? OK, so name me one market sector where the leading brand/product is also the cheapest?
That’s a hard one, isn’t it?
Another proof of the pudding is to go to a strange foreign country where the majority of brands and products are totally alien to you. Your initial reaction, probably, is to assume that they are all shit and will probably give you agonizing diarrhoea if you as much as lick them and so you instinctively reach for anything by a global brand that you recognize – anything from Heinz, Nestlé, Gillette, etc.
As time goes on in the strange foreign place you’re in, you’ll be subjected to advertising to local brands and see other people eating or drinking the products without dying and you’ll start to give those a try as well, but it is a gradual process to replace brands that have been at work on your stupid little brain for your entire lifetime.
It was also interesting for me to learn that different products have different brand identities across the world. This was brought home to me recently while doing something as simple as buying soap – not something that I have given a great deal of thought to before.
But I was interested to see that, here in Egypt, they sell Imperial Leather. Now to those people who live in places where Imperial Leatheris not on sale (such as the US), this is not a book from Victorian times on the joys of sado-masochism, or a Swedish punk band..
Oh, well actually Imperial Leather is also a Swedish punk band that sound like this:
Bloody horrible it is too. Someone should tell them to go and see The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle in which Malcolm McLaren (who should also have been on my list of greatest heroes) admitted that punk was nothing but a great big scam.
But that’s not really relevant.
No, I am talking about a brand of soap called Imperial Leather.
I’m a bit strange because I haven’t really followed the path of a typical consumer. I started off as a normal one in that I watched a lot of TV when I was a kid, and then a lot less when I was a groovy, partying, hardworking, twentysomething. But then things went wrong as I should have gone back to watching a lot of TV when I got into my thirties, as by then I should have got married and should have had kids which would have ensured that I was so knackered at the end of the day that all I could do was slump in front of a TV to watch bullshit programmes interrupted by bullshit advertising for over-priced products.
But I didn’t – and to make me even more weird, I moved away from the country as well.
The result of this is that the brand identity for a lot of products is still locked in the era when I was last a heavy consumer of TV, which was the late Seventies/early Eighties.
In these days, Imperial Leather was positioned as a high end product, an ‘affordable luxury’ – with advertising that positioned Imperial Leather in the same section of the soap market that Stella Artois occupied in the beer market in the late Eighties.
After making a bit of research, I realize that they have now changed tack with their strategy in the UK over the past two decades. It did, however, come as a bit of a shock to find that, here in Egypt, Imperial Leather is a pretty cheap and shitty brand of soap. It only costs something like 15p or 25c a bar, which is nothing.
While searching YouTube for some copies of their advertising from the 1970’s (and failing to find anything) I came across this clip which shows what an evil moneymaking machine the producers of Imperial Leather really are:
So this is what all those Nigerian scam artists are doing with the money they fleece off people – they’re spending it all on staying clean and smelling nice. Well it’s better than wasting it on drink, at least.
I didn’t buy Imperial Leather though, not because it is the soap of choice for thousands of Nigerian scam artists, but because the packaging still looks like it is stuck in the Seventies to me and I don’t like its snobby brand qualities.
So instead I went with another familiar old brand from yesteryear which is also sold surprisingly cheaply, which is Camay (mainly because of the fact that this comes in a lot nicer packaging).
This was, I admit, a bit of a gay, faggoty, nancy-boy choice for soap (I should instead have gone for something manly by Adidas or Gillette, but those brands are frigging expensive over here and, after all, it’s only fucking soap. No one else is going to know that I use a girl’s soap (or rather they wouldn’t have done so before I decided to blog about it).
Camay have done a good job in keeping the brand contemporary – it now comes in lots of different types with names like Camay Chic and Camay Passion which come in different coloured packaging and are probably advertised in such a way that there’s a sub-brand of Camay that is just right for your own lifestyle (unless you’re a hairy-arsed bloke who’s just looking for a cheap bar of soap to wash his hairy arse with).
The soap is really supposed to be used only be sexy, smooth-arsed people like this:
But when I came to actually open the bar of soap to start using it, I discovered I had made a terrible mistake. Just look at the frigging thing:
Camay Carcinogenique
The fucking thing is fluorescent purple!
How the hell did they decide to make the fucking thing that revolting colour?
I can just imagine the planning meeting with all of the marketing staff gathered in the conference room:
“So what colour shall we use for Camay Passion?”
“Duh … um … I don’t know. It’s a hard one.”
“Well, what’s another word for passion?”
“Errm … sex?”
“Good one, good one. So what’s a good colour for sex?”
“Errm … dunno.”
“Well let’s find out. Let’s all go to a sex shop.”
At which point the entire marketing department of Procter and Gamble head off in cabs to the nearest sex shop. Here one of them finds a plastic dildo made from bright fluorescent purple plastic.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, I have found the colour that encapsulates the concept of Camay Passion.”
“Wow, you’re a branding genius, boss.”
Camay Passion? I reckon it looks more like Camay Rádioactíve, or Camay Carçinogénique or Camay Chernobyl to me. I’m scared to rub the thing against my genitalia for fear that they will whither and fall off upon frequent contact.
So next time I think I’ll be better off with the Imperial Leather, or something that I’ve never heard of before. After all, common sense should tell me that a bar of soap is just a bar of soap. After all, all it is meant to do is get the grime and stench off your body more easily – it’s not exactly patented chemical rocket science.
