The books they tried to ban

The marketing message “The one they tried to ban” is a potent one, not only exploited by the music business but by publishers also.  When ex-spymaster Peter Wright attempted to publish his memoirs in 1985 he came up against the might of the British government which went to court in an attempt to suppress publication (Norton-Taylor 1988).  

Image from Amazon.com

Despite the fact that there was little in the book that was not already in the public domain, the notoriety generated by the attempted gag on publication ensured the book's success (Zuckerman 1987).  It is not just governments and official censors that can boost the popularity of a book through exploiting its non-availability: Flaubert, DH Lawrence, Salman Rushdie, Nabokov and many other authors appear to have benefited from being denounced by moral guardians.  Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code was hardly in need of a publicity boost ahead of being made into a film in 2005, but sales were not noticeably harmed when the world's press learned that the Vatican had appointed a Cardinal officially to debunk the heresies it saw in the book (see for example Pauli 2005).   

Similarly, sales of JK Rowling's Harry Potter books were buoyed by regular media reports that it was the most banned book in America (Capon and Scott 2013): Rowling’s publishers have also been adept at exploiting other aspects of psychological reactance theory -  in particular carefully withholding information from the media and giving the appearance that there would be restricted supplies of the books available (Brown 2001).


References

Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October
Capon, Felicity and Catherine Scott (2013), “Top 20 books they tried to ban”, The Daily Telegraph, 1 March
Norton-Taylor, Richard (1988), “Newspapers win Spycatcher battle”, The Guardian, 14 October
Pauli, Michelle (2005), “Vatican appoints official Da Vinci Code debunker”, The Guardian, 15 March
Zuckerman, Laurence (1987), “Press: how not to silence a spy”, Time Magazine, 17 August

Relax, don't do it: Switch off now

In ostensible demarketing, people grow to like something more when it is taken away from them. In third-party demarketing it is an outside body intervening that can cause a brand's value to soar. Parental Advisory Labels, for example, can boost sales of a CD by giving it a cutting edge that it might have lacked.

The attempted imposition of bans by regulators, backed up by the calls of moral guardians, are the stuff of legend in the music industry also.  One of the early arbiters of public taste was the BBC and its infamous Dance Music Policy Committee, whose archives date back to the 1930s.  Leigh's excellent 2007 study of these shows how the corporation objected to innuendo and direct reference to sex, drugs, brand names, blasphemy and other taboos.  

Frankie Goes to Hollywood: image from LastFM.com

What happens when a piece of music gets banned? ‘Relax’, the debut single from Frankie Goes to Hollywood was banned shortly after its release in 1984 by the BBC, the single going on to reach number one and stay there for 5 weeks (Gareth Grundy writing in The Guardian, 2011).  It was a similar story for other classic pieces, not just ones censored by the BBC: the Evil Dead, Serge Gainsbourg, the Sex Pistols, Louis Armstrong, Frank Zappa, the Beatles, Billie Holiday and Pink Floyd all succeeded despite – or perhaps, because of - officious regulators or censors (Neil Spencer writing in The Observer, 2005).   

What better way to be noticed in a crowded marketplace, what more effective way of establishing the cutting edge credentials of a piece of culture than to have it withdrawn? see Stephen Brown's excellent piece in Harvard Business Review, 2001).  Ostensible demarketing exploits the principles of psychological reactance. In music it works by provoking Taste Guardians to talk the outrage, and then exploiting any subsequent ban.


References
Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October

Grundy, Gareth (2011), “Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax 'banned' by the BBC”, The Guardian, 11 June
Spencer, Neil (2005), “The 10 most x-rated records”, The Guardian, 22 May

The Power of provocation: Third party ostensible demarketing

In Third Party Ostensible Demarketing (quite a mouthful), a brand owner attempts to provoke the regulators into banning something - a piece of advertising, for example.  This is what easyJet did in 1996 - their marketing director at the time describes it in his book Gorilla Marketing (Anderson 2010).  When it comes to advertising you produce a piece of provocative copy and then let it loose: if you can get some controversy going first then the regulators are more likely to act.  It can be quite straightforward to provoke the 'taste guardians' - church leaders, certain political figures, etc., and the mass media has a role in whipping up controversy also.

So, what happens if  your advertisement is banned?  No problem, you put it onto Youtube or Facebook with the label "The one they tried to ban".  The undisputed master of this is Paddy Power.

How advertising is designed to be banned: from the book
'Ostensible Demarketing', published by Routledge 2013

In the book 'Demarketing' there is a model of how this works. It shows how in the case of an advertisement, the key is to tip off 'taste guardians' that this ad is about to appear.  They in turn press for a ban, which makes the news and boosts the ad's visibility.

It is not just advertising that is boosted through banning.  Books, films, music and other cultural products gain extra publicity and credibility when third party regulators get involved.  Once again, the product is exposed to 'taste guardians' who call for a ban.  The controversy boosts sales for very little cost, and even if it is withdrawn the principles of psychological reactance kick in.  This theory describes how when something you enjoyed is removed you tend to long for it still more.



Reference

Anderson, Tony (2010), Gorilla Marketing, London: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd

Paddy Power: going the extra mile to provoke

Image from Paddy Power blog on Wordpress

A recent example of a brand courting controversy is Paddy Power.  Theirs seems to be a classic case of third party demarketing - designed to be provocative in order to get banned.

Like the early easyJet study, Paddy Power campaigns picked strategically placed billboards on which to make provocative gestures (mocking Fernando Torres, for example).  Provocation seemed to define the Paddy Power brand, although one would be hard pressed to find the company admitting to deliberately deceiving the public and media.  Brown had earlier (2001) described how the fruit juice brand Tango had been censured in 1994 for duping an estimated 30,000 people into calling a bogus customer help line. Paddy Power, though, seemed to adopt the approach advocated by George Shaw of Avocado Media, leaking the story and allowing the press to find it for themselves.  In 2012 the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) ruled on 7 formal complaints about Paddy Power, upholding 6 and rejecting one.  It also informally resolved 5 cases figuring Paddy Power marketing, including sales promotions, web pages and emails.  Dutifully, Britain's national and trade press reported the complaints and judgments: obligingly Paddy Power made the banned material available to the public via social media and the worldwide web.  

The company's own YouTube pages included the boast “Paddy Power Blind Football - Most complained advert in 2010" – although ironically this was the sole complaint which the ASA rejected from that year.  Paddy Power's YouTube presence includes 90 videos, which at the time of writing had been viewed nearly 14 million times.  These were fed by 125,000 followers on Twitter and 730,000 fans on Facebook.


References
Brown, Stephen (2001), “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October

Shaw, George (2013), Brookmans Case Study, Avocado Media, London, via www.avocadomedia.co.uk/Pages/case.html  accessed February 2013

Ditch the bitch and other insults

Image from Marketing Week

Third party demarketing is when an outside body intervenes to ban a product or piece of marketing. Even if they are not successful, the surrounding publicity normally gives the brand a tremendous boost.  Which is what they were counting on.

One example of this strategy comes from George Shaw, the PR specialist responsible for the notorious 2001 'Ditch the Bitch' advertising campaign for London divorce lawyers Brookmans.  Shaw fell just short of admitting to deception: “Experience has taught us that the press are more likely to cover stories that have been leaked or they have unearthed for themselves” (Shaw 2013).  The client in this case was able to leverage a minute advertising budget into a campaign worth in excess of £1.5 million by carefully and covertly orchestrating viral marketing to give the impression to national media that the public was outraged by the slogans “Ditch the bitch” and “All men are bastards” (Clarke 2001).  

Shaw's strategy seemed to be to leak details of two otherwise obscure posters to moral guardians (women's groups) and regulators (the Advertising Standards Authority and the Law Society).  When the media storm had died down it became clear that far from being outraged, virtually nobody from the general public had complained (Dyer 2001), so there was no ban and no investigation. The Advertising Standards Authority received a single complaint: when this was rejected the campaign generated more headlines.

There was more good news for the creative team behind the low-budget campaign. It won the top award that year for ambient from the advertising trade journal Campaign.


References

Clarke, Anna (2001), “Legal firm attacked over 'ditch the bitch' ad campaign”, PR Week, 16 May

Dyer, Clare (2001), “Divorce lawyers' posters attacked”, The Guardian, 16 May
Shaw, George (2013), Brookmans Case Study, Avocado Media, London, via www.avocadomedia.co.uk/Pages/case.html  accessed February 2013

Where does the gorrilla sit?

Image from www.towerbooks.com

In third party demarketing, an outside body attempts to restrict the marketing of something, and often ends up doing the job for the brand owner at no cost to them.

An unusually frank admission about the use of this kind strategy comes from 1996, courtesy of what was then a start-up airline. easyJet was opening a new Luton to Aberdeen route, but with an established competitor in British Airways, and short of funds to finance a major promotional push, easyJet instead booked advertising spots close to the BA's checkin desk at Aberdeen Airport (Anderson 2010).  They then designed a poster in BA colours and typeface warning "Beware! Thieves operate in this airport". This provocative execution, which tied in with easyJet's wider PR message about BA's fares, predictably was vetoed by the airport authority: what followed was what easyJet's marketing director at the time called “a strategic leak” to the local Press and Journal (Anderson 2010), which obligingly gave the offending poster front page coverage.  Nowadays, of course, it would be on Facebook.

Advertising bans have become something of a staple of the now fiercely competitive airline industry, with easyJet as likely to be complained about as to make complaints (see for example Farey-Jones 2011 and 2012).  A new strategy seems to be emerging with this form of attack advertising: in making a complaint the rival travel company positions itself as the consumer's friend; however, in defending it the original company is able to generate publicity by attempting to substantiate the claims made.

Anderson called his book Gorilla Marketing from the old joke:  "Q: Where does an 800 pound gorilla sit?  A: Anywhere he wants to".  easyJet spent its early life trying to provoke the gorilla (British Airways).  Now the irony is that on most measures easyJet is the bigger airline.  But, as Stephen Brown (2001) noted, “There’s nothing like a little outrage to attract attention and turn a tiny advertising spend into a megabudget monster”. An 800 pound monster, perhaps?

References

Anderson, Tony (2010), Gorilla Marketing, London: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd

Brown, Stephen (2001), s “Torment your customers (they'll love it)”, Harvard Business Review, October
Farey-Jones, Daniel (2011), “EasyJet business ad banned after Ryanair complaint”, Campaign, 27 April
Farey-Jones, Daniel (2012), “EasyJet complaint leads ad watchdog to ban train ad”, Campaign, 9 May

Midodrine: keep taking the tablets

Photo: Steven Saltzberg's Genomics blog

What happens to patients when a drug they have relied on for years is suddenly due to be taken off the market?  This was the situation for users of Midodrine in 2010, when the US regulator the FDA announced that the drug's licence was to be withdrawn.  Goldacre (2012: 138-140) tells how the drug had been developed and patented, and had been approved in 1996, but with only limited clinical data to support its therapeutic claims.  Fourteen years later, the patent owner had still failed to provide this evidence (although the company disputed this). The FDA's announcement provoked a public outcry from some of the 100,000 US users of the drug, triggered in part by anecdotal evidence from patients published in the national and international press.  

Backing up the stories of patients desperate that something which, regardless of the trials, worked for them (there was no other clinically proven alternative on the market), was a Facebook campaign which helpfully linked supporters to their representatives in Congress.  When the FDA reversed its decision after just a month of lobbying, some of the same publications which had earlier criticised the FDA for ignoring the voices of patients (for example Miller 2010), now derided the same agency for ignoring its own stated principles of evidence-based decision making.  More bizarrely, the owner of the Midodrine patent), which had announced that it was to cease manufacturing in any case, changed its corporate mind and decided to continue to market the drug (Star Tribune, citing Associated Press 2010).  

The original action of the FDA I call 'third party demarketing', which is where an outside body - goverment, regulator, judge, etc. - intervenes to try and ban or restrict a product or service. This action often results in boosting demand, as the principle of psychological reactance kicks in. This theory states that withdrawing something that people have enjoyed the freedom of causes them to like it still more. In the case of Midodrine, patients felt this was something they could not do without. The flurry of press activity just after the FDA's original intention to withdraw the product licence may have been spontaneous, or may have been triggered by PR agencies hired by the manufacturers. The outcome was the same, though: the FDA backtracked and, despite the lack of clinical data, patients continued to be prescribed Midodrine.


References

Goldacre, Ben (2012), Bad Pharma: How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients, London: Fourth Estate

Miller, Henry I. (2010), “Agency dithers, reputation withers - Ditsy decisions make for dizzy bureaucrats”, The Washington Times, 29 September 
Star Tribune (2010), “FDA backs off plan to withdraw Shire low blood-pressure drug midodrine from market”, Star Tribune citing Associated Press, 6 September

Accidentally on purpose: strategic ostensible demarketing

When BMW announced in 1997 that it was having to restrict supply to the UK market, this was an example of strategic ostensible demarketing.  

• It was ostensible because it is clear that no rationing of these luxury cars happened: the company's sales kept rising from 60,000 cars back then to 180,000 in 2012.
• It was strategic because it was a decision made and announced by BMW itself.
• It was demarketing because the threat of restricting supply seems to have been made in order to boost sales.

Graphic from psdpond.com

BMW, like Coca-Cola, Heinz, supermarkets and the music industry were happy to profit from the theory of psychological reactance, which predicts that when you take something away from people they only desire it more. This may be an accidental outcome (we could call this serendipitous marketing, and was what Coca-Cola claimed had happened), or it may be a clear choice (Kotler and Levy defined ostensible demarketing as "giving the appearance of demarketing" 1977).  

It is almost impossible to find examples that conform to Kotler and Levy's definition: to do so the company must have admitted that their intention all along was to deceive the public. Coca-Cola, with sales and market share rising following demarketing, shrugged it off saying "We are not smart enough for that" (Clifford 2009). BMW said nothing but kept importing the cars and counting the money.


References

Clifford, Stephanie (2009), “Coca-Cola Deleting ‘Classic’ From Coke Label”,
Kotler, Philip and Sidney Levy (1971), “Demarketing, yes, demarketing”Harvard Business Review, November-December, pp. 74-80

Extra Virgin: getting back on track

Psychological reactance is a theory that when consumers learn that something they have enjoyed may be taken from them, they discover how much they actually like whatever it was.  One example of this was the decision by the Britain's Department of Transport in 2012 to award the new contract for west coast train services to First Group.   Virgin Trains had held the contract for the previous 15 years and had fought hard to retain the franchise.

Photograph from The Guardian

Almost as soon as the announcement had been made, Virgin customers started to campaign via social media to have the decision reversed.  Despite Virgin Rail being the country's second most complained about train operator (Osborne 2012), users rushed to its defence; there were suggestions that there was an implicit anti-Virgin bias in the bidding process (Topham 2012). Whatever the official figures on complaints, when the service was threatened with withdrawal users discovered that they could not imagine life without it. Over 100,000 people signed an ePetition calling for the First Group award to be reconsidered (Topham 2012).

Within weeks the government's decision to award the contract to First Group had to be reversed, although ostensibly the reason had nothing to do with the public backlash (Topham 2013).


References

Osborne, Hilary (2012), “Virgin Trains v FirstGroup: which is best?”, The Guardian, 15 August

Topham, Gwyn (2013), “MPs blame west coast mainline fiasco on 'complete lack of common sense'”, The Guardian, 26 February

Warning: Parental Advisory - buy this!

Parental Advisory Labels are used in the music industry to warn customers that the music they might be considering may contain profanities, blasphemies, sexual references or other unspecified transgressions. They started to be introduced in the US in about 1985 as a form of demarketing, designed to discourage the young and vulnerable from purchasing the product.

John Denver was sceptical about the value of
Parental Advisories

There is some anecdotal evidence, though, that the PAL system actually encourages sales, and that many would-be buyers actively seek out CDs with the warning in place. This kind of behaviour is understood by psychologists who call it psychological reactance. It is also understood by parents, particularly those with teenaged children, who have learned that the easiest way to encourage their youngster to do something is to forbid it.

At about the time the PAL system was introduced a US Senate conducted a hearing into the issue of lyrics in popular music. The normally mild-mannered folk musician John Denver was called: some of his well known pieces like Rocky Moutain High had incorrectly been tagged as being drug-related. Denver surprised senators when he explained that the labelling system would probably be counter-productive:

“That which is denied becomes that which is most desired, and that which is hidden becomes that which is most interesting. Consequently, a great deal of time and energy is spent trying to get at what is being kept from you.” (US Senate 1985: 65-66)

In other words record labels could artificially and quickly boost the street credibility of their bands by ensuring that their recordings were given the Parental Advisory sticker.

Reference

US Senate (1985), Record labelling: Hearing before the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Ninety-Ninth Congress, First session on contents of music and the lyrics of records, Washington: US Government Printing Office

Give us this day our daily bread

One afternoon, way back in 1979, I got home to find my neighbour in a dilemma. She had been to the supermarket and bought 6 loaves of bread - the news that day had warned that there was likely to be a strike across the baking industry and like countless others she rushed to the shops to stock up before the shortages happened. Unfortunately, when she got home she found that there was no room in the freezer: it was still chock-a-bloc with bread she had bought before the previous strike a few weeks earlier.

Supermarkets were learning at the time that the threat of a shortage would trigger panic buying (Hassall 1999): this is called psychological reactance, a theory which describes how when consumers are denied something they previously enjoyed, they desire it still more. The wider, more commonly known phenomenon is that of panic buying, and 'ostensible demarketing' in this case at least, describes how retailers restrict supply through rationing in order to boost demand.  

The phenomenon of profiting from an ostensible demarketing campaign is not limited to Britain of course: Gerstner et al (1987) showed how US supermarkets had profited from rationing products and from stock outage. Supermarkets in the UK were later to find that in a similar way, rationing bread during a price war boosted demand to record levels (Jury and Gregoriadis 1999). In just the same way that the threat of fuel shortages in Britain more than a decade later (threatened strikes by tanker drivers in this case) caused demand to rocket and supplies quickly to become exhausted (Milmo 2012).  

The problem with ostensible demarketing is one of motivation. There are many examples of companies benefiting from demarketing, but few where they would admit to deliberately deceiving the public. Coca-Cola, for example, rejected conspiracy theories when it bounced back after withdrawing its core product from the US market: "We are not that smart", they claimed (Clifford 2009). Supermarkets and fuel stations profited from shortages, but they surely didn't cause them.


References

Clifford, Stephanie (2009), “Coca-Cola Deleting ‘Classic’ From Coke Label”, New York Times, 31 January
Gerstner, Eitan, James Hess and Wujin Chu (1993), “Demarketing as a differentiation strategy”, Marketing Letters, 4:1, pp. 49-57
Jury, Louise and Linus Gregoriadis (1999), “7p loaf marks greatest price war since sliced bread”, The Independent, 5 February
Milmo, Dan (2012), “Petrol tanker strike averted as drivers accept deal”, The Guardian, 11 May

Sold out: BMW rations cars to protect the brand

In 1997, BMW in the UK was having a mixed year. Although its sales were up 20% on the previous year, the company was worried, and announced to the press that demand was outstripping supply (Smith and Nuki 1997).   Moreover, it was concerned about the effect its success was having on BMW, telling the Sunday Times “Exclusivity is an extremely important feature of the BMW brand," and warning that "If we sold 100,000 cars next year... we would do it at the expense of some of the values which make BMW what it is" (Nuki and Hamzic 1997).

These claims were backed up by the Sunday Times's own motoring correspondent, a certain Jeremy Clarkson, and interviews with prospective BMW owners - all of whom confirmed that the brand was losing its exclusive cachet.

As a result BMW announced that it would henceforth be restricting sales to 60,000 a year.  The rationale was sound enough: if you have an exclusive product, you need to restrict supply to keep it that way. At this point, though, psychological reactance kicked in: this theory predicts that when consumers learn that their ability to enjoy something is under threat they react by discovering just how much they value it.  

BMW was duly rewarded by an increase in sales of over 12% in the following year (Burt 1999), achieved in a shrinking market and with the added bonus of a strong pound significantly increasing the profit per vehicle sold (Duckers 1999).  Fast forward to 2012:  BMW sold nearly 180,000 cars in Britain (Russell 2013). This figure, though, includes 51,000 BMW Minis, a category which didn't exist in 1999. 

References

• Burt, Tim (1999), “Britain: BMW 's Rover offshoot suffers near-20% decline”, Financial Times 8 July
• Duckers, John (1999), “The Birmingham Post: Call For Car Firms To Drive Down Prices As Sales Fall”, The Birmingham Post, 7 December 7
• Nuki, Paul and Edin Hamzic (1997), “BMW rations cars to keep its cachet”, The Sunday Times, 9 November
• Russell, Jonathan (2013), Britain in the driving seat as car sales leap to four–year record, The Daily Telegraph, 8 JanuarySmith, David and Paul Nuki (1997), “Boom is official as the Porsche yuppie rides again”, The Sunday Times, 17 August

Careless Wispas bring brand back

While in the case of  Classic Coke the threat of withdrawal was able to trigger a brand revival, Cadbury's Wispa is an example of where nostalgia for a defunct product was used to resurrect a dead brand.  The chocolate bar in question had been discontinued without demur in 2003, but a social media-based campaign to bring the product back to life in 2008 'persuaded' the company that “consumer passion” (Sweeney 2008) would support a carefully planned relaunch. 

In the event the product became the company's fastest selling product in four years, shifting 12 million bars in the four weeks following its reintroduction.  According to the BBC Wispa was largely responsible for the 11% jump in sales that Cadbury reported in 2008-9, the re-launch year. The company continued to benefit and was able to extend the brand by introducing an ice cream Wispa (Beckett 2011). The Wispa relaunch won Cadbury's an award for advertising effectiveness in 2010 from the IPA. Multiple new variants were then introduced, including Wispa Gold and the product's future seemed assured, even in a crowded marketplace. 

However, nothing lasts forever and by 2012 Wispa was in need of a new boost. Strategic Ostensible Demarketing had worked before, so why not give it another try? Wispa Gold had been withdrawn, but it was then revived in time for the 2012 London Olympics (according to Marketing), where it was linked to the idea of the gold medal. 

This time Twitter was the focus of social media activity, rather than rely on spontaneous consumer pressure: according to Brand Republic, Cadbury's took an active tactical role by managing Wispa Gold through Promoted Accounts and keyword searching. The audience was incentivized by offering a box of chocolate for every reTweet which used the hashtag #WispaGold. A Spandau Ballet classic from 1983 was remixed for Cadbury's and launched as a video and an iTunes download, helping to spread the conversation. The results? Sales figures for this campaign matched those from 2008, 41 million bars selling in 18 weeks.

Wispa is an interesting case: psychological reactance theory predicts that when a product is about to be withdrawn consumers invariably discover how much they like it. In 2008 and 2012 the revival of Wispa and Wispa Gold seem to have been delayed longings - missing a dearly departed friend. It was nothing short of miraculous - two brands brought back to life by ostensible demarketing.


References

Beckett, Alex (2011), “Wispa to hit freezers as Cadbury serves up an ice cream variant”,

Sweeney, Mark (2008), “Cadbury calls on Wispa fans for ad help, The Guardian, 5 November

Heniz Salad Cream: goodbye, hello

A good example of ostensible demarketing is the British staple, Heinz Salad Cream. In 2000 the company pronounced the death sentence on this long-established brand, only to see its fortunes revived.   Salad Cream had been on British dinner tables for nearly a century, but the former market leader had been overtaken by more fashionable rivals such as Hellmann's Mayonnaise.

Losing sales and market share, Heinz annouced that it was going to take the product off the market.  But while in the case of Coca-Cola the consumer 'backlash' came when the product was withdrawn, Heinz was 'persuaded' to give their brand a stay of execution by the consumer campaign which followed from the announcement (Smithers 2010).  Consumers seemed to have rediscovered their love for Salad Cream, and as happened with Coca-Cola, could not imagine life without this national treasure.

A new branding strategy swung into action (Richardson 2001) with the rising tide of consumer goodwill being tapped into with an exercise repositioning of Heinz Salad Cream for a younger audience, including a substantial price increase. Fast forward another decade and the brand's health seems to be secure: time for a brand extension - a new lemon and black pepper salad cream.

The level of detail in this rebranding (pricing, packaging, promotion, distribution) suggests that it had been thought through in advance, in other words that that withdrawal announcement created the appearance of demarketing, while in practice Heinz correctly anticipated the role of psychological reactance theory in re-awakening brand loyalty. This theory predicts that when your ability to enjoy something is withdrawn (or threatened) you will often come to appreciate it more.


References

Richardson, Belinda (2001), “Kitchen classic: salad cream”, The Daily Telegraph, 7 July

Smithers, Rebecca (2010), “Dressing fancy: after 96 years, Heinz Salad Cream gets a new flavour”, The Guardian, 1 September

New Coke: now you see it, now you don't

Image from Time Magazine

A good example of ostensible demarketing was the decision by Coca-Cola in 1985 to replace their staple product line with something called New Coke: the mistake, according to Ringold (1988) and others was not the launching of New Coke (the company spent $4 million on market research), but the decision to take the long-established original product off the market.

As numerous other studies have reported (see for example Oliver 1986), Coca Cola's decision to withdraw Classic Coke, produced a very different outcome to the public relations disaster described in many entry-level marketing textbooks.  Prior to the “debacle” (Clifford 2009), when the company was forced to reintroduce Classic Coke in the US, Coca Cola had lost its market leadership and continued to suffer declining market share.  Within 6 months of the attempted demarketing these trends had reversed, Coca Cola regaining the lead from Pepsi and continuing to show growth in sales and market share into the late 1980s (Ringold 1988).   

Whether intended or not, the company's removal of a long-established brand appeared to trigger a collective bout of national grief at the passing of a loved-one, followed by a Proustian remembrance of its core qualities on the re-introduction.  The extent to which an initial demarketing decision led to a reversal of a long-standing decline led to speculation that the whole exercise was indeed (in Kotler and Levy's terms) creating the appearance of a strategic marketing withdrawal with the express intention of boosting a declining brand (Haig 2011:13).  This charge was disingenuously rejected by the company, which shrugged off a threatened consumer boycott as “a humbling experiment” (Clifford 2009).  It was an example, as Ringold (1988) observed,  demonstrating the classic features of psychological reactance.

There are many examples where demarketing a product, or having an advertisement banned, has benefited the brand, but hardly any where the marketing people have publicly admitted that this was their intention all along.  This is unsurprising, as owning up to any kind of manipulation of public and media alike could easily rebound.  More common is the reaction of Coca Cola to accusations that they had deceived the public in 1985: their claim “We are not smart enough for that” (Clifford 2009) neatly dodged the ethical questions and positioned the company as being the consumer's friend.  

References

Clifford, Stephanie (2009), “Coca-Cola Deleting ‘Classic’ From Coke Label”,

Haig, Matt (2011), Brand failures: the truth about the 100 biggest branding mistakes of all time, London: Kogan Page Publishers

Kotler, Philip and Sidney Levy (1971), “Demarketing, yes, demarketing”, Harvard Business Review, November-December, pp. 74-80

Oliver, Thomas (1986), The Real Coke, the Real Story, New York: Random House

Ringold, Debra Jones (1988), “Consumer response to product withdrawal: the reformulation of Coca-Cola”, Psychology and Marketing, 5(3), pp. 189-210