Coals to Kracow?

International brand marketing is a fascinating discipline, and like many I was fascinated by the article in Marketing.

Returning Poles spur exports of British food brands to Poland

by Alex Brownsell Marketing 16-Jun-08, 12:38

Of course the stats are interesting and the whole thing seems to stand up intuitively. When the Brits started to travel more in France, sales of wine and other French consumables took off… when Greece hit the collective travel consciousness, we, lemming like, bought retsina and Metaxa. But I guess the underlying message for all marketers is ’sampling’. If you want to promote a brand to a foreign market, get them to try the product/service.

More missing the point.

Hmmm… so in another effort to help protect us from ourselves, the government are suggesting banning all show of logo’s etc. for cigarette merchandising. I am constantly amazed at politicians confusion between the brand and brand communications… but it does present an interesting thought exercise.

If cigarette brands (or any other brands for that matter) are banned from communicating their brand or using their brand assets, where will brand differentiation come from? I guess in ancient times before we had many formal brand communication, Eli the bowmaker made fine bows. One expert bowman might ask another where he got his bow, to be told it is one of Eli’s bows. So, it is word of mouth, stimulating conversations and generating viral brand communication. So are we likely to see cigarette brands exist in the world of personal conversations?  Will there be a flowering of smokers’ blogs? Are we talking Fag 2.0?

Sadly we will probably never know because such a fascinating social experiment will never happen as another sound bite idea is destined to end up under the Westminster sink with the yogurt maker and the multi-chopper.