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marketplace, what more effective way of establishing the cutting edge credentials of a piece of culture than to have it withdrawn?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

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