A tasteful, classy, English marketing campaign
We posted the other day about the intertwined relationship between beer giants Anheuser-Busch and Guinness, as reflected in the marketing of A-B's Irish style stout, Bare Knuckle. Well, A-B's rollout of their pugilistically name beer seems like a model of decorum compared to a marketing campaign currently being inflicted on Britain and Ireland. Today's Irish Times reports (may require subs) that the trade association for Irish publicans is warning its members to avoid stocking a soon to be distributed English alcoholic beverage called Roxxoff. Roxxoff is within the class of beverages known in Britain and Ireland as "alcopops", and Americans will recognise the genre by its general description: fruit flavoured beverages containing some (but not much) hard liquor, pre-mixed and sold in bottles.
It's difficult to overstate the tackiness of the publicity campaign for this drink. We're sufficiently out of touch with the current state of English in the land of Shakespeare to be not even sure as to the exact sexual innuendo the name invokes, but anyone can get the general idea. The ingredient list claims to include Chinese herbal aphrodisiacs, and it didn't take long for the English media to christen Roxxoff and similar products as Viagrapops. We doubt that either Pfizer or the drink manufacturers are complaining. But the Irish trade association is unhappy and offers the not unreasonable critique that
The name and marketing of this product is associated with sexual success which is absolutely outrageous and totally unacceptable. It is obviously aimed at young people and it is blatant exploitation without any thought for the serious consequences it could have on their lives.
It's fair to say that this basically correct position is not motivated entirely by altruism, but reflects that the fact that drinking in Ireland is a hot-button issue, with concerns about violence, drunk driving, and under-age drinking, so Roxxoff is arriving at exactly the wrong time in PR terms. We wish them well in their attempts to keep it out, but the media steamroller is already moving -- set in motion by their reaction.
In fact this whole marketing campaign shows just how easy media manipulation is. Roxxoff is being brought to the world not by a large conglomerate (with a global image to worry about), but a small wine distributer in the southeast of England. This stuff probably costs pennies per bottle to make -- vats of cheap vodka, fruit concentrate, and, oh yes, those Chinese aphrodisiacs. Then just fax a few newspapers your sales pitch, and presto, you don't even to have run ads. Note that this Observer article (and by the way, the Observer might think of itself as a paper above this sort of trash marketing) includes a correction saying that the original article falsely claimed that (Kylie sister) Dannii Minogue would be appearing in the Roxxoff ads.
Who told them that she would be? It doesn't say, but we'd guess that little detail was in the original fax, as classic bait for a lazy journalist. Our Google search for this post also revealed that many papers around the world had picked up one of the original newspaper pieces -- without the Dannii correction of course. The company can make a fortune over the summer with the resulting publicity, and then just pull the drink off the shelves when the uproar becomes too much. And then the cycle begins again.