How Do You Market "Trust?"

A Dummy's Puppet's Ramblings - from Chip Martin, Puppet
(Mannequin American views and guidelines on marketing/PR trends plus bits of humor and interesting but useless information.)

This Kid Could be a Fireman ... Sorry, I Mean "Firefighter"

    Here's one of three really funny ads from Huggies. Okay, maybe it's just funny to guys and puppets ... but the ad does a good, attention-getting job of demonstrating how Huggies can handle even the strongest of infants. Let me know if it makes you laugh out loud.

Who Do You Trust?
How do you market "truth?" Vero Labs has a new product out called "Liquid Truth" which may help cut to the chase. It's a spray with the pheromones Androstenone and Androsterone plus a "unique Oxytocin hormone formula."

I recently saw an episode of Boston Legal that dealt with this product. A woman was suing a man who spritzed himself with pheromones and she fell for him. She claimed he had used the pheromone spray to mislead her. Little did I know that it was a real product.

I don't fully understand the science behind it, but Vero Labs claims "we've found that people using this new product are prone to being more confident, and that makes a world of difference." Well, I would hope so; a one-ounce spray bottle goes for a rather rarified $79.95. Details are at Vero Labs.com.

Hats Are Back on Top
If your read the fashion magazines (or Playboy ... I've been told), those in the know are predicting that men's hats are coming back. And the ad below for Hut Weber suggests that the big difference between Adolf Hitler and Charlie Chaplin was "the hat." Really?

Britain's Daily Telegraph reports that the ad "is groundbreaking because the taboo of using Hitler in any other context but a historical one would have been unthinkable until now." (Chaplin's family might not be that impressed.) And creatively, the ad might be less groundbreaking than they think, as a similar idea was employed in this campaign for a Belgian optician, which, in my opinion, was actually cleverer.

Executive Access Letters Can Work - Part 2
It's possible to attract the attention of hard-to-reach executives via properly formatted and packaged business letters. Here are a few tips.

• Sell the meeting, not the solution. With every word ask yourself, "Will this help me to get the meeting, or is it something I should save for the meeting?"
• Display knowledge of the customer's business.
• Write the way you speak. Why utilize "utilize" when you can use "use?"
• Be mechanically flawless. In short, don't type it yourself.
• Pre-sell the letter to the executive's assistant. Talk to the assistant and confirm spellings, titles, addresses and the like. Let them know the letter is coming and ask when the best time and method to follow-up is.