Above: at the entrance to a supermarket I was stopped by a white rabbit gathering prospects for the Fitness First gym chain. Obviously it wasn’t really a white rabbit – it was someone dressed up as a white rabbit. The rabbit offered various health tests (blood pressure, lung capacity, body fat ratio) and took names for follow up calls (selling gym memberships).
This “promotional modelling” is a theatrical variation on the sandwich board man (a man who would walk up and down the streets with advertising placards strapped to his body). Charles Dickens invented the term “sandwich men” to describe the armies of promotional workers who walked around the streets of London in Victorian Times. The concept has recently been parodied in the launch of the new FREE Film Four channel, with Dame Judi Dench dressed as a lobster and Ewan McGregor dressed as a tomato handing out leaflets in Trafalgar Square.
Usually marketers are wary of using these tactics for fear of making their brand look ridiculous. What is beyond doubt is that promotional modelling does get your message across. As my old marketing tutor used to say: “You might ignore one of these characters, but you can’t ignore ten or fifteen of them strung out along the North Orbital Road.”
2 comments:
A White Rabbit? And their clients are called Alice, I presume?
I was also wondering what the connection was between a white rabbit and a gym chain, Manjusha. It's probably something subliminal. Or else their marketing is chaotic and unplanned and has no real theme to it (more likely to be the case!).
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