Survival or Success
What’s in a word… if you are in advertising it has to be the right one…
As I settled in Shugart as Director of Sales… I got more involved in our ads… and the message they conveyed…
At that time we were launching a new product and had a warehouse full of this new product waiting for our customers to finish their development…
Since the product needed an extra card… (sometimes hard to get) I had the bright idea to sell the product in a kit form… The disk drive (8”) the card and cable set… We agreed to go on an ad campaign and asked our P&R and ad people to come out with an ad…
After a week they came up with “SURVIVAL KIT”… and a sub text saying “Let us help you with our survival kit”…
That ad appalled me… there was a negative connotation in that ad… so I changed it to “SUCCESS KIT”… and sold out the product…
Some time later I joined the French company Bull and opened a US subsidiary called Cynthia Peripherals… The name came from the French tradition of naming a project by looking at the date on the Saint Calendar… and naming the project by the closest woman’s name… thus Cynthia…
The product was a ten and a half inch disk drive… which was a unique dimension… but since I had a very large advertising budget… I blocked the back page of every Computer System News (the most popular publication at that time) for my dramatic ad…
The ad consisted of a huge bright yellow lightning bolt and the text saying… “The Ten and a half Commandments”… followed by some gibberish on the product…
What’s in a word… if you are in advertising it has to be the right one…
As I settled in Shugart as Director of Sales… I got more involved in our ads… and the message they conveyed…
At that time we were launching a new product and had a warehouse full of this new product waiting for our customers to finish their development…
Since the product needed an extra card… (sometimes hard to get) I had the bright idea to sell the product in a kit form… The disk drive (8”) the card and cable set… We agreed to go on an ad campaign and asked our P&R and ad people to come out with an ad…
After a week they came up with “SURVIVAL KIT”… and a sub text saying “Let us help you with our survival kit”…
That ad appalled me… there was a negative connotation in that ad… so I changed it to “SUCCESS KIT”… and sold out the product…
Some time later I joined the French company Bull and opened a US subsidiary called Cynthia Peripherals… The name came from the French tradition of naming a project by looking at the date on the Saint Calendar… and naming the project by the closest woman’s name… thus Cynthia…
The product was a ten and a half inch disk drive… which was a unique dimension… but since I had a very large advertising budget… I blocked the back page of every Computer System News (the most popular publication at that time) for my dramatic ad…
The ad consisted of a huge bright yellow lightning bolt and the text saying… “The Ten and a half Commandments”… followed by some gibberish on the product…
1 comment:
I am so impressed with your recall. I can't even remember what i ate for lunch yesterday! Enjoying the look back, Ivo.
Carol C
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