Offended by Valentine’s Day products?….
The Vermont Teddy Bear company has been coming out with some tv commercials and products that are being touted by some as less-than-wholesome.
In the end, I guess you win some and you lose some. So, whether or not these ads are deemed successful will likely depend entirely on the audience they are trying to reach. I assume they’ve done their research and are able to quantify how much people connect with the brand name and the brand’s image to know whether or not they will actually lose sales from people who will be turned off any of these other approaches.
The VTB Co. took quite some criticism for their Valentine’s day tv ads/products:
- their Valentine’s day spot is described by Gelf Magazine as: “its visual style is porn-like”;
- then again there is the was Vermont Teddy Bear’s recent playmate bear;
- as well as a strait-jacketed “Crazy for You Bear”, which StigmaBusters, of NAMI (the National Alliance on Mental Illness) took offense to;
- and, the National Italian American Foundation gave a thumbs down to “by the “Gangster of Love” which wears a fedora, white spats and carries a violin case. The internet ad (see store.yahoo.com/vtbear/vdaygangster.html) reads “Be a goodfella. Send her this Bear and she’ll be singing like a soprano!” “
Now with Mother’s Day fast approaching, VTB has another tv ad out there which has a less-than-traditional tone. Here’s how I would describe it: A bunch of dad’s are secretly working on making hand-made Mother’s Day gifts and a little boy comes in telling them that they instead should be buying a Vermont Teddy Bear. Here the dad’s are depicted as being “less-than-intelligent” and the child is shown as the smart mature one. I personally don’t care for this type of role reversal which many tv shows seem to take, too. I’ll keep an eye out for which groups find these VTB Mother’s Day ads and products offensive.
Or, maybe it’s true that even bad publicity is still publicity.
