On Monday morning, a promotion team for the new Disney/Pixar movie "Up" was in Salt Lake City, with an armchair rigged with helium balloons - and local media types were invited to take a ride.

The Tribune sent humor columnist Robert Kirby to give it a try. Alas, things didn't go so well. And when things don't go well for Kirby, the good news is that the rest of us get a good laugh.

Here's Kirby's column, and here's the video:



(Photo and video: Francisco Kjolseth/The Salt Lake Tribune)

Labels: marketing, Robert Kirby

As I was leaving the opening-day press conference of this year's Sundance Film Festival, some smiling person handed me a flimsy yellow totebag with a sample of instant cappuccino mix.

Since being given free stuff isn't anything new at Sundance, I folded the tote and stuffed into the messenger bag I was already carrying and went on my way.

Little did I know that the little yellow totebag - with the logo "I (heart) Cafe Bustelo" - was part of a carefully orchestrated marketing campaign, aimed at revitalizing an 81-year-old coffee brand.

As The New York Times reported this weekend, the Miami-based makers of Cafe Bustelo have been laboring for the past few years to make the brand - a blue-collar label familiar in Latino markets - hip and trendy.

The "I (heart) Cafe Bustelo" logo was visible at the recent Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, and samples have been giveaway items at events tied to the Oscars and the MTV Video Music Awards.

Labels: marketing, Sundance

The first rule of marketing should always be, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." But marketing people always look at things as broken, whether they are or not, because then they can get credit for fixing it.

But when the "fix" is roundly rejected by the consumer, then what?

For PepsiCo, the answer in the case of its Tropicana orange juice brand is to go back to what worked before. The New York Times reports that after numerous complaints that the two-month-old package design for Tropicana, which featured a large glass of orange juice, was "ugly" and looked like a generic store brand, PepsiCo is bringing back the brand's old orange-with-a-straw logo.

The switchback is an embarrassment both to PepsiCo and to the design firm Arnell in New York, which was responsible for the $35 million redesign and accompanying ad campaign. (Peter Arnell, the design firm's founder, is also responsible for Pepsi's new logo - and is being mocked in media circles for a memo that relates the new Pepsi logo to Da Vinci, feng shui and the earth's gravitational fields.)

Labels: marketing