Real men battling snakes
Jim Hightower was on the Dr Pepper FOR MEN story in 2011.
It seems that the honchos over at the Dr Pepper Snapple Group have done intensive market analysis and found that men think of diet drinks as…well, girly. So they flinch at buying them.
So of course the geniuses in charge of the vats of flavor figured out a way to make a new Dr Pepper with only 10 calories but still the same amount of manliness. It’s a miracle how they did it, but we will never know more, because it’s a secret secret secret.
The pepped-up Dr Pepper is being launched with a massive, testosterone-infused ad campaign that bluntly proclaims: “It’s not for women.”
TV ads will run on all networks during college football games, and the promos will reek of machismo, showing men — real men — in a jungle battling snakes. Also, instead of the gentle bubbles on Dr Pepper’s regular diet can, the cans of Ten are gunmetal grey — with silver bullets. Pow!
In case ladies still don’t get the point that this is a manly man’s drink, they might go to Dr Pepper Ten’s Facebook page. There, they’ll find a virtual shooting gallery that invites members of the male species to fire virtual bullets at such feminine symbols as lipstick and high heels.
Because it’s never a bad idea to encourage men to get violent toward women and their symbols. Aw hell no!
So, I take it back about the irony. They did mean it.
‘The pepped-up Dr Pepper is being launched with a massive, testosterone-infused ad campaign that bluntly proclaims: “It’s not for women.”’
Well, if it’s chock-full of testosterone, women are probably best advised to leave it alone.
;-)
Nope it’s the ad campaign that’s infused with testosterone.
Plus those 10 calories will still rot your teeth…
Coke has been doing this quietly for years. Its whole “zero” line is identical to its “diet” line, but their marketing surveys found many men thought “diet” was too girly.
As far as I know, their ads don’t make a big deal out of this, but ad placement is probably carefully targeted.
The chain of associations in this kind of decision is interesting. It seems to be that women were first to be shamed about their bodies, so they were the first to really take to ‘diet’-style products, which led to the ‘diet’-style products to be associated with women, which led men to neglect ‘diet’-style choices, which has contributed to men *needing* more ‘diet’-style choices as their own failure to conform to the ideals of masculine fitness catches up to them, which has led to rebranding to get around the misogynistic association up the chain. That rebranding is another misogynist link in the chain, and who knows what other links will spring from it.
I just wish we could break the fucking chain already.
^ especially since diet foods are now associated with poor health outcomes including, ironically, obesity as a result of them being flavour enhancers.
I had the delight recently of ordering two ‘treats’ I hadn’t had for months. A sweet pastry and a small bottle of Coke Zero. I laughed when the person serving me rolled their eyes.
Battling snakes? I can’t even conjure an image.
A while back in the UK the chocolate bar Yorkie had a long history of imagery associating itself with being a big, chunky chocolate bar for truck drivers. Why truck drivers I’m not sure but that was their brand image. Then they too it one step further proclaiming it “not for girls” with a red crossed circle over the kind of symbolic woman you see on toilet doors etc.
I don’t know if it was deliberately tongue in cheek or what they actually planned but I do know my daughter (aged about 8) and most of her friends deliberately started buying Yorkie bars… and eventually a a “girls” version with a pink wrapper was put out.
Oops, I’ve just found you’ve already covered this further down the line. Sorry, I was moving backwards down the posts.
Heh. No problem. It started with the Yorkie bar, then a friend on Facebook pointed out there’s also the Dr Pepper thing, so off I went barking down the trail.
@Steamshovelmama:
Yeah, marketing of Yorkie bars has been ludicrously macho since its inception in the 70s. Funny, since I personally associate the word ‘Yorkie’ with tiny, yappy dogs which do not seem to fit the classic macho brief. I assume the name has something to do with the bars originally being made by Rowntree’s, which was based in York, rather than on the Yorkshire Terrier, but who knows?
Anyway, yeah, the gap Rowntree’s imagined it saw in the market was that chocolate was for women and they wanted men to buy it too. Forgetting, apparently, everything about the history of chocolate. So the natural thing to do was make bars of chocolate more chunky-looking than other bars of chocolate and therefore more masculine. It’s hilarious that they picked the truck driver as the epitome of masculinity. Because….. sitting behind a steering wheel eating chocolate all day is….. the height of machismo?
Rowntree’s was an early user of merchandise in marketing. I remember having a toy Yorkie truck, for some reason. I have no idea how we came about that object, my parents would certainly not have bought it. My dad was a truck driver and while – like the rest of us – he has many faults, machismo is certainly not one of them.
I had all but forgotten about the existence of Yorkies until they decided to double down on the macho with the No Girls Allowed campaign. The problem is as always that if you object to borderline irony like this, you’re the one who doesn’t get it, the one with no sense of humour. You’re as bad as them damn feminists who just need to lighten up a bit. And for some reason that’s what makes it ‘OK’ to use gender in a campaign like this and not race. It’s not like women really suffer or anything, right?
I hadn’t seen the Dr Pepper thing. It does look as if they were aiming for irony but got caught up in the ‘joke’. It’s all too easy for that to happen because, again, the people who object can be dismissed as not having a sense of humour.
I remember when Coke zero first came out that it tasted exactly the same as diet, but I also noticed that Coke zero bottles were fastened with a considerably higher torque. Really seriously manly!