Collateral Damage

The courts have agreed that Johnson & Johnson’s lawsuit against the Red Cross over the use of the red cross was one of last year’s top 10 dumbest marketing moves.

J&J, which also uses the symbol, filed suit in U.S. District Court in Manhattan against the American Red Cross and four of the charity’s licensees, seeking to prevent them from using the “Greek red cross on a white ground,” claiming that it is a trademark violation and that the humanitarian group was barred from using it for commercial purposes. But U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff disagreed, noting that the American Red Cross had used the emblem for more than a century and was authorized to do so by various Geneva Conventions and the U.S. Congress.

I really want to know who got the job of telling the board of directors, “Oh by the way, we’re suing the Red Cross.” There was no possible good outcome from this. Even had they won in the courts no consumer without a law degree would have understood it.

Logoblink has an excellent and informative display of Presidential election logos from 1960 to the present. I say informative because it is quite clear that graphically as well as politically most candidates in the last 48 years have been interchangeable.

Still, I know who I’m voting for.

Comedy Central has even more details on Battlestar Gallactica vs. the actual candidates here.

And speaking of voting for lame characters, turns out Brit PM Gordon Brown lost his latest election to NONE OF THE ABOVE. As mentioned previously Madame Tussaud’s wax museum had put it up for a vote as to whether or not Brown should be included in the collection. Well, “83.8 percent of voters, drawn from museum visitors and online supporters, gave Brown the thumbs down. Some 5,308 people told Madame Tussauds not to bother, while 1,025 people (16.2 percent) said he should be immortalised in wax.” Yeah, but I bet the Supreme Court will rule him in.

A great Brazillian graphic designer named Mario Amaya has taken a few of favorite brands and run them into each other at top speed. See some of the efforts below and see more here. His blog, Following Is For Cattle, makes me wish I’d paid attention when the Providence public school system was trying to teach me Portuguese.

Not sure if this is brilliant or depressing. Or both.

Chrysler announced Monday an offer that caps the price of gasoline at $2.99 a gallon for three years for people who buy or lease new vehicles from Wednesday through June 2. The offer is based on 12,000 miles of driving per year at the vehicle’s rated fuel economy. Customers will get a card for buying gas that is linked to their own charge account, Chrysler said. The customer will be billed $2.99 a gallon, and Chrysler will pay the rest.

I’m sure the honchos in Auburn Hills did their math on this (and when was the last time a US car company didn’t correctly anticipate fuel costs?) but to me it looks like this could get pretty expensive.

The story goes on to point out that at the current $3.61 a gallon average gas price, someone who buys a new PT Cruiser (est. 21 MPG) would only cost the company $1075 per car. That seems a bit much but not ridiculous for a car with an MSRP of $15,285.

However let us take the radical notion that gas prices have not yet peaked. If the price of gas hits $5 a gallon (and I wish that were unthinkable) the total cost to the company hits $3300*. Even if the price “only” hits $4.50 per, the company is on the hook for $2580 per car. Suddenly that PT Cruiser is costing Chrysler a lot.

All of this, btw, assumes something we all know to be false: That there is a relationship between the advertised MPG and what you actually get. If the car actually gets 18 MPG then Chrysler has to pick up the actual difference. At today’s prices that means a mere $150 increase over three years. However at $4.50 it’s about $500 more — which means Chrysler is in essence selling the PT Cruiser for about $12K. For the consumer it’s a great anti-inflation move, for the shareholders though? Well, for gas company share holders it’s great.

The other thing that will contribute to Chrysler’s costs is the fact that consumers will probably buy more expensive grades of gas. Why not always get super premium if it only costs me $2.99?

Here is my own personal indicator of the impact of the price of gas: I am now driving at or below the speed limit. This news so shocked Mrs. CollateralDamage that she briefly put down the latest guide to Disney.

*(In case you’re wondering here’s the formula I used 12000[miles] / 21 [MPG] = total gallons consumed [which I'll call G]. G * price = total cost / (G * price - 2.99) = annual cost to Chrysler * 3 = total cost to Chrysler. Given my legendary inability to do anything beyond basic math I put this out there so that someone can and will correct me.)

I guess what was 31 is now down to 30 at Baskin-Robbins — nope 29, Mr. Baskins predeceased Mr. Robbins.

Robbins opened his first ice cream store in Glendale, Calif., in December 1945, following his discharge from the Army. Robbins offered 21 flavors at that store. His brother-in-law, the late Burton Baskin, opened his own ice cream store in neighboring Pasadena a year later. The two eventually joined forces.

Coolest. Family. Ever. But did they split the profits 21/10?

In an effort to have their vaguely pizza-like product and eat it too, Papa John’s “issued an apology to Cleveland and the Cavaliers for making T-shirts with LeBron James‘ number and the word ‘crybaby’ under it.“  On Thursday Cleveland residents will be able to get a large, one-topping alleged pizza from the chain for 23 cents, James’ jersey number. The company is also kicking in $10K to a charity sponsored by the Cavaliers.

Second prize is two Papa John’s pizzas for 23 cents.

Yes I know there are places in this nation where Papa John’s is considered good pizza. I weep for those places. In Boston we have places that have already been closed by the Health Department that make better.

Now how’s that for brand loyalty?

The case involves 21-year-old Timothy Caudill, who last year was held in a residential community corrections program in Nelsonville for breaking into a bar. While there, prosecutors said he bought the oatmeal creme pie from a vending machine and shared it with a fellow inmate who was on restriction and wasn’t allowed access to snacks.

I think someone at McKee Foods Corp. ought to be signing Mr. Caudill up for a deal.

Best part: “Plays SpongeBob SquarePants Theme at the end of temperature taking.” Yeah, that’s gonna make the kid happier.

For reasons I won’t even pretend to understand the most consistently viewed page here at the Damage is: Headline of the day: SpongeBob Squarepants Digital Camera Is Neither Square-Shaped Nor Made Of Sponges. Its 2188 views make it the 4th most viewed page after my 2006 and 2007 annual lists of the Top marketing blunders and the gallery of grenade-shaped products that was linked to from DarkRoastedBlend. But that SpongeBob headline is like money in the bank. EVERY WEEK it is either the first or second most visited post. So I’m hoping that the Square one can do some more magic here.

Is it a brand war or a cat fight? Islanders from the Greek island of Lesbos are suing the Homosexual and Lesbian Community of Greece because its name “insults the identity” of the island.

“My sister can’t say she is a Lesbian,” said Dimitris Lambrou. “Our geographical designation has been usurped by certain ladies who have no connection whatsoever with Lesbos.”

1. Never EVER get into a fight with a Lesbian.
2. You don’t get better branding than this. Open a Subaru dealership, put Martina on every tourist ad you can and buy your sister a house on Thassos.
3. You can’t win.

Apparently the hot idea in niche alcohol sales is to put your product into a package that looks like a weapon of personal destruction.

The tequila company Hijos de Villa offers both a sidearm and a long-gun.

There’s also a choice vodka in two different iconic machine guns: The Tommy or the AK-47. Or it you want to better target your vodka, there’s also a Sniper version.

Sadly you have far fewer choices if you don’t drink the hard stuff. Wine drinkers are all liberals, right? So the best you can do is a bottle opener for your Beaujolais. And beer drinkers don’t even get that. Yep, despite its claims to be the Silver Bullet — there’s nothing from Coors (or any other brewer I could find) that had any trace of verisimilitude on the topic.

Of course you can put whatever substance you want in one of these flasks. You have a choice of one that looks like a pistol or looks like it saved you from a pistol. (If we ever become really good friends I’ll tell you the story of why I drove a bayonet through a silver flask.)

And fear not if your taste for mood altering substances run to something less potable:

Hey, they originated the Potemkin Village, right?

Russia’s southern region of Ingushetia is trying to overcome its reputation for bombs, murders and shootouts by paying for a glossy supplement featuring strutting dancers and smiling mothers. The eight-page, full colour supplement entitled “My Favourite Republic” appeared inside copies of the popular Moscow newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda on Tuesday. … “Ingushetia, it is an amazing, beautiful region,” the supplement said on its front page. “You could talk about it endlessly.”

Or you can believe what the US State Department says about Inqushetia and the rest of the Caucasus:

Throughout the region, local criminal gangs have kidnapped foreigners, including Americans, for ransom. U.S. citizens have disappeared in Chechnya and remain missing. Close contacts with the local population do not guarantee safety. There have been several kidnappings of foreigners and Russians working for media and non-governmental organizations in the region. Due to the ongoing security concerns, U.S. Government travel to the area is very limited. American citizens residing in these areas should depart immediately as the safety of Americans and other foreigners cannot be effectively guaranteed.

I went to ComeBackAlive.com, the website for Robert Young Pelton who writes The World’s Most Dangerous Places and was very disappointed to find only very dated material on Russia and its dangerous places. Tsk, Tsk, Robert. CLARIFICATION: Actually the site does have more recent info, it’s just that when I used the search function the first page and a half or so of results were all for the site’s DangerFinder archives. Once I did a search for Chechnya -DangerFinder, I got the new stuff. Now I’m just disappointed with the site’s search function, not its actual content.

The top prosecutor for the Iranian Republic says that Barbie, Batman, Spiderman and Harry Potter are all conspiring to subvert the youth of today.

Ghorban Ali Dori Najafabad said Iran was the world’s third biggest importer of toys and suggested this posed a threat to the “personality and identity” of the new generation. “The unrestrained entry of this sort of imported toys … will bring destructive cultural and social consequences in their wake,” he wrote. He added many toys were smuggled into Iran and accused importers of concentrating on profits at the expense of cultural values.

Man, this puts me in a bind. While I am certainly down with Bats, Spidey and Mr. Potter, I have always been troubled by Barbie. While the original (right) was a human shape and had a fairly sassy look in her eyes, later models became the absurd and subservient creature we all know today. However compared to more recent hyper-sexualized dolls like Bratz, she is positively demure and the personification of feminism. (Feminism (noun), a set of beliefs predicated on the notion that women are people too.)

Given that I guess I’m cool with Barbie doing a little subverting of one gender stereotype by displaying another one. It kind of reminds me of Slavenka Draculic’s wonderful book How We Survived Communism And Even Laughed. In it she writes about her feminist friends in the West would be shocked when Draculic, a Yugoslavian back when that meant something, would visit them and wear lipstick and frou-frou clothes. They saw this as acquiescing to a stereotype. For Draculic it was just the opposite. These things allowed her to assert her individuality while living in a nation that was trying to eliminate the individual. I suspect Ms. Draculic would (or does) approve of Barbie as revolutionary.

And, can I just say that if your belief system can be subverted by Barbie et al., then it really doesn’t have much of grasp on its audience.

I love the fact that this came from the Iran’s top prosecutor. How absurd is that? I mean can you imagine the US attorney general doing something similar? Like covering the breasts of a statue of blind justice because of its threat to the nations morals? Oh wait, never mind …

The war against replica bull balls is expanding.

Senators in the Sunshine State have followed the lead of Maryland and Virginia and “voted to ban the fake bull testicles that dangle from the trailer hitches of many trucks and cars throughout the state.“

Republican Sen. Cary Baker, a gun shop owner from Eustis, Florida, called the adornments offensive and proposed the ban. Motorists would be fined $60 for displaying the novelty items.

This is getting serious folks. Maybe we ought to consider an amendment to the constitution. I am tempted to put a trailer hitch on my 2000 Volvo S40 just so I can piss someone off. I do see them periodically up here on the wrong side of the Mason Dixon and I just think they’re funny.

I think the people at YourNutz.com and other vendors should really make a campaign contribution to Sen. Baker et al., as a way of saying thank you for the free PR.

As you know, we here at The Damage are hot on the latest developments in toast-shaped products. However, we also do our due diligence which is why we, unlike those actually paid bloggers at Gizmodo, knew that this Archie McPhee product was an April Fools joke. (In fairness it must be said this took some painstaking research: I clicked on a link.) Astute readers will note this is simply a photoshopped version of McPhee’s less-expensive and only slightly less-baffling inflatable toast pillow.

Well, that’s one way to read this headline: “Disney chases older boys with adventure toys, shows.”

Walt Disney Co. is turning up the speed and power to balance its tiaras and flowers, as boys who have grown beyond Mickey Mouse are seeking fun and adventure outside the entertainment studio’s kingdom. Disney, whose two strongest franchises until 2001 were the gender-neutral Winnie the Pooh and Mickey Mouse, has seen product sales skew toward girls since Disney Princesses, launched that year, has turned into a $4 billion phenomenon among 3- to 6-year-old wannabes.

In other words, after years of pretending that this market didn’t exist The Mouse has found that Pirates of The Caribbean is bringing in the boys. I say “pretending the market didn’t exist” because three years ago the head of their consumer products division explained their all-girl approach by saying no one had success connecting with older boys. It was such a preposterous statement from such an otherwise smart guy that I translated it to mean, “we haven’t come up with it yet.”

BTW, one question for the honchos at The Mouse: WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO PUT OUT PINOCCHIO ON DVD??? It’s one of my all time faves and I can’t wait to terrify CollateralDamageJr with it.