7 Reasons

Tag: marketing

  • Russian Roulette Sunday: Make Do And Mend.

    Russian Roulette Sunday: Make Do And Mend.

    Russian Roulette Sunday

    Hello. It’s Sunday again. And Sundays come as Sundays do – after five days of hoping that the other 7 Reasons writer has come up with something for Sunday. They never have. Which is why Marc came to me yesterday, breathless and devoid of inspiration, and said, ‘We don’t have anything for Sunday do we?’

    ‘No,’ I replied, supping on a cup of tea and stroking my mirror.

    ‘Damn,’ was his silent reply.

    We sat in silence for a minute or twenty. Neither one of us prepared to say, ‘Let’s have a Sunday off’. Then, just as I was about to snap my gingerbread man at the neck, Marc leapt out of his chair and kicked the cat. ‘Let’s do some more advertising!’ he declared.

    ‘Marc,’ I began, my blood beginning to simmer at my colleagues scant disregard for our lack of money, ‘we don’t have any finances. You gave all our money away to Pearl & Dean and my masks have proved about as popular as Esther Rantzen in a…well about as popular as Esther Rantzen’.

    ‘You make a good point Jon,’ Marc said, taking off his pith helmet and vaulting over the desk, ‘but maybe we can just make do and mend.’

    I looked puzzled, Marc was using phrases from World War II again. ‘How do you mean, Marc?’

    ‘I mean, we just use a load of old adverts and pimp them to suit 7 Reasons. Then we can ask people to put them up in their windows and on the back of their cows.’

    ‘Genius!’ I shouted, sending tea all over my groinal department. And with that Marc left, leaving a waft of whisky and a cat stuck in my plant pot.

    Thirteen hours later we were finished. And so was the cat.

    So yes. Please choose your preferred poster and stick it up in your place of work, caravan, shed or personal telephone box. Then take a photo and send it to us. It’s not that we are an unbelieving duo, we just like to know our hard work has been worth it.


  • Russian Roulette Sunday: Promoting Brown

    Russian Roulette Sunday: Promoting Brown

    The 1960s: clothes, interiors, fabrics, art – just about everything – were a riot of colour.  This wasn’t much help to the (predominantly British) manufacturers of brown dyes and paints though, which was problematic, as during that decade their production continued apace.  The result was, that by the 1970s, Britain had a huge surplus of brown colourants and needed to find a market for them to help with the balance of payments.  This led to the formation – in 1971 – of the Brown Marketing Board, a government funded organisation devoted to the task of promoting the use of the colour brown by manufacturers and consumers alike.

    While researching 1970s advertising, we came across many fine pieces of work by the Brown Marketing Board and today, we thought we’d share a few of them with you.

    1.  Swatch. A very simple poster, placed on the London Underground, on bus shelters and other street-level sites where people congregated.  It was purely placed there as a brown colour swatch, the idea being that anyone standing near it would appear uncoordinated if they weren’t dressed in brown.  Sales of brown coats to London commuters soared, thus proving that the simplest ideas are often the best.

     

    A brown colour swatch poster by the Brown Marketing Board

    2.  Germans Eat White Chocolate. By the 1970s, Britons had still not gotten over the war, as this poster designed to promote the consumption of brown chocolate demonstrates.

    A Brown Marketing Board poster used to promote the consumption of brown chocolate instead of white chocolate

     

    3.  If Only The Carpets And Curtains Matched. A poster used to encourage the use of brown in all areas of interior design.  Looking back at pictures from the 70s, it seems that this campaign must have been a success.

    A Brown Marketing Board poster from the 1970s to encourage uniformity in interior design

    4.  Brown Bears Don’t Kill Seals. We’re fairly certain that they weren’t encouraging people to divest themselves of their pet polar bears in favour of brown bears.  We think that this was probably just an attempt to promote brown as having generally “good” qualities.  Sales of Fox’s Glacier Mints plummeted as a result of this controversial image though, and it was soon withdrawn.

    A poster by the Brown Marketing Board featuring a bloody polar bear and a seal corpse.

    5.  Arrive In Style. What can we say?  It’s a brown Austin Allegro.  Perhaps this image contains a powerful subliminal message, because British Leyland sold loads of them.  No one knows how.  Maybe it was this advert.

    A poster advertising the Austin Allegro by the Brown Marketing Board.

    6.  Also Available In Brown. A very clever poster designed to increase the consumption of domestic produce in two ways.  Firstly, using brown sauce instead of ketchup would help the sales of brown food dye.  Secondly, it reminds us that brown sauce is a British tradition – after all, the H.P. in H.P. Sauce stands for Houses of Parliament – so the increased use of brown sauce would directly benefit British manufacturing interests.

    A poster by the Brown Marketing Board designed to promote the use of brown sauce instead of tomato ketchup

    7.  Score In Style. Well, you wouldn’t want to win ugly, would you?

    A Brown Marketing Board poster from the 1970s featuring the infamous 1970s brown Coventry City - CCFC - away kit