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