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As you can see from my last post about Zippo Fragrance. It's a bad idea to brand your product with a failing concept and/or product. It's kind of like drilling more holes in a sinking ship let the water out. Quite simply a bad idea.

Zippo is a proud company with proud and noble history. Being able light a cigarettes while on manoeuvres or on post may not seem like much until you are put in that situation for weeks or months at a time. Zippo has had a an amazing following world wide, but now that smoking is becoming something that less and less people want to be associated with, the lighter is falling short. There will still be a following for the lighters and some may even like the new fragrance, but that market segment is getting smaller with each and every passing year.

I love the idea of Zippo Fragrance, just not the way it's being marketed. I think Zippo would be better off making a new offshoot brand for itself like Proctor & Gamble as done. Rather than having one cool branding that is loosing favour with the public, have a new brand campaign for the new product that is not necessarily associated with the other brand especially the failing one. The Fragrance doesn't have to come in a bottle the shape of lighter, it could have come in any other shape conceivable.

I believe that Zippo got lazy on this one. Instead of taking the time and effort to re-brand it's self to a new consumer market, it just tried to live off  the old name and concept. My grandmother used to say, perfume is a stink to cover up a stink unless you don't notice it. Its ironic that Zippo is trying to cover up the stink with a new stink.

I do like the writing instruments, and the candle lighters, very nice and very classing. It's okay to retool and re-brand. Some people may not know this, but Nokia started out as Gum-Boot manufacture. Gum-Boots to TVs to Cellphones is quite a tale of growth and metamorphosis.

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Today in the drug store I came across Zippo Fragrance. It caught my eye because the bottle of cologne was in the shape of giant lighter. I was quiet surprised to see this but then I thought that as Smoking is on the decline than so to should smoking related paraphernalia. Apparently in March of 2011: Due to significant decrease of sales from 18 million lighter a year in the mid-1990s to about 12 million lighters this year related the anti smoking campanes. Zippo Manufacturing Co. will try offering a wider variety of products using Zippo brands such as watches, leisure clothing and cologne. This strategy is similar with a success of Victorinox Swiss Army Brands Inc. has had selling watches, luggage, clothing and fragrance.


Zippo's history is an interesting one.
George G. Blaisdell founded Zippo Manufacturing Company in 1932, and produced the first Zippo lighter in early 1933, being inspired by an Austrian cigarette lighter of similar design. It got its name because Blaisdell liked the sound of the word "Zippo" and "zippo" sounded more modern. On March 3, 1936, patent was granted for the Zippo lighter. Zippo lighters became popular in the US military, especially during WWII — when, as the company's Web site says, Zippo "ceased production of lighters for consumer markets and dedicated all manufacturing to the U.S. military." The Zippo at that time was made of brass, but as this commodity was unobtainable due to the war, Zippo used steel during the war. While the Zippo Manufacturing Company never had an official contract with the military, soldiers and armed forces personnel insisted that (BX) stores carry this sought-after lighter. While it had previously been common to have Zippos with authorized badges, unit crests and division insignia, it became popular among the American soldiers of the Vietnam War, to get their Zippos engraved with personal mottoes. These lighters are now sought after collectors items and popular souvenirs for visitors to Vietnam.
After World War II, the Zippo lighter became increasingly used in advertising by companies large and small through the 1960s. Many of the early advertising Zippo lighters are works of art painted by hand, and as technology has evolved, so has the design and finish of the Zippo lighter. The basic mechanism of the Zippo lighter has remained unchanged.


While Zippo Fragrance has a very cool website and is trying very hard to appeal to a demogrphic that may not be smoking with a cool looking Zippo lighter purfume bottle, they may be missing the point of sale declines. Zippo might be over looking something. If Zippo contines to brand its self as a lighter it may continue to loose sales. It is unlikely that some one would want a bottle of purfume in the shape of a lighter unless they really liked smoking and thought that a lighter shaped bottle of cologne looked cool. For people who don't smoke and never have smoked this may even look kind of tacky and for people who used to smoke but have since quite they may not want a remider. The die hard Zippo enthusiast may want the Zippo Fragrance, but as the zippo customers decline so shall will the Fragrance sales if it is being braned as a lighter.

The light was cool, it had tough and useful appeal. The lighter any lighter is a utility object, but a bottle of purfume in the shape of a lighter is just not as cool even when it is made to look like like a cool lighter.

Hope you enjoyed reading this.

I'm presently completing an internship with a fashion company. One of my jobs was to create a catalog for our B2B2C costumers. While there is a great deal of design that goes into such a creation there is even more research into the target demographic. Which photos go where, how to introduce the photos and how to talk about the garments so to best reach the costumers in your demographic. Someone could possibly make the best catalog ever, but if it isn't aimed at your target market then you might as well just waist a lot of time and money and resources just chucking your work into the wind. And I'm only scratching the very tip of the tip of the iceberg.

Behavioural marketing is widely used in internet advertisements but it can be found else where, such as my catalog. However, the real power of Behavioural marketing is in the internet where internet behaviour can be tracked and recorded such as browsing and buying habits of consumers to your site or even throughout the internet. Such data is actually collected and sold. This data can then be used to create powerful advertising campaigns that use subliminal advertising like this video clip from the


Subliminal advertising is not new and is now being refined with some pretty hefty calculations and psychological research. With any research there is some argument about whether it actually works or not. The argument against, basically suggests that the information is displayed too quickly for the viewer to process while the argument supporting its effectiveness suggests that the viewer's unconscious brain is recording and processing the information. Those who don't believe in it say, "If the information is unconscious then it is not being processed." I'm not here to start this debate though.

Behavioural marketing and not subliminal advertising actually makes perfect sense. By knowing that your costumers are looking for your product and considering buying it then Behavioural Marketing is only making it easier for the costumers to find and making the educational information more readably available. Behavioural marketing is not reprograming or classically conditioning the consumer like Pavlovian dogs drooling over the next thing to buy. Rather, at this point at least, behavioural marketing is making advertising more convenient for both consumer and seller to find one another.

Can Behavioural Marketing be used to persuade the consumer to buy? Yes and No. It really depends on how suggestible your audience is, and how trusted the seller is. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) is a communication technique to put the listener into a light trance for greater suggestibility that is growing in popularity especially among politicians. But this would be very hard to do over the internet at least for now, and the listener would have to trust the speaker/advertiser. Derren Brown demonstrates this in practice in the following video.

I would like to leave you with one more video just for fun from Derren Brown where he goes into subliminal adverting with two advertising employees. Like I said, this is not Behavioural marketing by itself, but rather facilitated by Behavioural Marketing.