Dress Shoes for Tall Jewish Men to Wear on Tuesdays

Ask any good marketing person and they’ll tell you one of the most important skills in all of marketing is being able to identify the needs/desires of your target market. Before TIVO came about I always thought it was interesting to see what commercials aired during various TV shows. It lets you know who is most likely to be watching that particular TV show. As a guy you know you’re in trouble when the TV show you’re watching has a lot of women-oriented ads.

The place where I see the most ads (by far) is watching football games, though I don’t exactly understand who advertisers think are really watching football games. Based on the commercials I see on a regular basis the typical football-watching person is a guy who drinks a ton of cheap beer, drives a pick-up truck, eats at fast-food restaurants, needs financial advice and buys lots of IBM Blade Servers. Ads in football games have changed over the years, but the one constant has been the beer commercials. A rough, back-of-the-napkin calculation makes me believe that in my lifetime (just from watching NFL football games) I’ve seen about 5 whole days worth of beer commercials (figure 4 commercials/quarter = ~8 min/game x 2 games/week x 20 weeks/season x 22 seasons of football = ~5 days). Ironically I don’t drink any of the beers that are advertised in games (though I do enjoy those Coors Light ads. I want more Denny Green and Jim Mora!).

Just like any good marketing campaign, retail stores also do a lot of work in identifying their target customer base. Look at Target and Wal-Mart or Whole Foods and Safeway. My personal all-time favorite retail store (from a market segmentation standpoint) is Japanese Weekend Maternity Wear (which is right next to Ben and Jerry’s in Santana Row if you have any desire to patronize them). I’ve always liked to imagine what the conversation to select a target market went like. I bet it was something like this:

Person A: I think we should focus our new store on clothing for pregnant women
Person B: Hmmmm, that’s good idea, but it’s already a crowded space. We need to further segment our target market.
Person A: What if we focused on pregnant women who were Japanese? That’s a highly targeted and unique segment of the population.
Person B: Yeah, that’s true, but I still think it’s too broad. There are literally millions of Japanese women, and many of them get pregnant. We should segment this further.
Person A: Ok, you’re right. What if we focused solely on clothing they wear on the weekends?
Person B: So we’d focus on selling clothing that pregnant Japanese women would want to wear of the weekends?
Person A: Right
Person B: Brilliant!

Every time I pass by the store I think of the Simpson’s episode where George H.W. Bush moves in across the street. In the beginning of the episode the whole neighborhood is having a garage sale. In preparation for the garage sale Marge finds a jean jacket in the attic that Homer had made that says “Disco Stu” on it. She asks who Disco Stu is and Homer explains that he was writing “Disco Stud”, but ran out of space. The joke is completed later in the episode when we first meet the character (who has subsequently appeared in many episodes) aptly named Disco Stu. His friend advises him that he should buy that jacket, to which Disco Stu replies, “Disco Stu doesn’t advertise.” We are left to wonder what the odds are that Homer would actually have a potential customer with that exact name, but who still is uninterested in purchasing the jacket.

In the interests of full disclosure here's the real reason for the name of the store. Turns out "Japanese Weekend" is the name of a dance routine the founder created. I'll stick with my interpretation though. I like it more.

Finally, A Reason To Travel To Ecuador

Yesterday I flew back to the US from London without too much hassle (word of warning to those flying in the UK: they now have a strict 1-bag carry-on policy for ALL flights). Overall my flight was mostly enjoyable and I got a lot of work done. Still I felt like something was missing, only I couldn't figure out what it was. Now I know, what I was really looking for was a lingerie fashion show while I was on the plane. Of course to have had that I would have had to have been on one of Air Icaro's new flights (there's a video along with the story, tasteful of course. Be sure to note the facial expressions of the passengers).

Seriously, I'm not creative enough to make this up. This belongs in the marketing hall-of-fame. Anytime I see something like this I can only imagine the "boardroom" discussion. I bet someone made a PowerPoint presentation with two slides:
-Problem: We're having trouble attracting business to Icaro Airlines (web site)
-Solution: Hire attractive models to give passengers 10 minute fashion show while they're on the air plane.

I hope whomever came up with the idea gets a raise. I did some research and there's actually a Wikipedia entry on Icaro (interesting note, Wikipedia already had the info on the lingerie show, what an amazing resource). Note they have a grand total of 6 airplanes (3 of which are called "Fokkers" -- I'd never fly in one of those). SIX AIRPLANES! That's not an airline. It's more like a car service. Hell I think a lot of companies have more than six airplanes. Seriously though, you run a tiny airline in Ecuador and you need to increase traffic. This is a great way to not only do that, but get a ton of free advertising (how much would you pay to appear in Dauber's World? Can I start the bidding @ $10K?).

Of course, seeing this makes me realize that we'll never get something like this in the States. If a US airline ever did this they'd get boycotted by all sorts of organizations. TV commentators would feign disgust and people would go on and on about how our morals are deteriorating. I for one applaud Icaro's efforts and promise to fly them the first chance I get.

Unilateral Phase Detractors and Sinusoidal Depleneration

This is a bonus post. It was just too funny to pass up. I wasn't sure just how fake the video was, but a quick Google search (seriously, what would you do without it?) yielded a random thread that discusses an article from a mechanical trade journal in 1945. Further investigation (seriously how awesome is Wikipedia) yield the truth. As you'd expect, it's completely made up. Anyways, just watch the video and soak it up. Bernard Salwen was a genius.