Banana Marketing
filed in Design: Marketing on Oct.19, 2007
I’ve heard the term “guerrilla marketing” before, but this takes it to an extreme! I grabbed a banana from the house this morning. When I got to work and went to eat it, the sticker caught my eye. (Sorry for the bad camera phone photo). The sticker design depicts the orangutan, King Louie, from Walt Disney’s 1967 classic animated feature The Jungle Book. And guess what, he’s eating a banana! How clever!
The banana is distributed by Del Monte, but apparently they’ve partnered up with Disney to market the release of the new 2-disc DVD of The Jungle Book. The label also directs the eater of the banana to the website fruits.com, where you can see all about the wonderful DVD release, enter a sweepstakes and watch video clips from the movie.
On one hand I love to be surprised by creative marketing, and this one surprised me. On the other hand, do I really want advertising on my fruit?
October 19th, 2007 on 7:40 pm
Hey Kenny at least it’s a clever although blatant tie in. The message has to make sense with the medium. In this case the banana eating jungle book monkey with well… a banana. There’s nothing worse than marketing that doesn’t make sense with the creative or the medium. Hey maybe kids will eat more fruit this way.
October 25th, 2007 on 9:12 am
Why can’t that bananna speak for itself? It would then only have a voice for other bananas, not DVDs. It needs that tie to multimedia so it can become so much more than a topping for cereal and ice cream. If you ask me, that banana asked for it. So much valuable real estate. Not only could it get to your kids, but think of the exposure in the cafeteria! Meanwhile, we have deemed it socially inacceptible/annoying to have a telemarketer call at dinner time but OK to have advertising in big-chain menus. We can disect it into a milltion pieces, but it comes down to; sell more, keep the ecomomy going and pay my electric bill. The banana sticker may be effective, suprising and obvious, but not creative. Or is… effective, suprising and obvious… creative? Good one.