The parallels between 1983’s Mr. Mom and today’s automotive woes are scary. Jack Butler (Michael Keaton) loses his auto plant job due to layoffs. Caroline (Teri Garr) is forced to return to advertising to support the family.
Hijinks ensue. Jack can’t handle the kids. Caroline handles a sexist boss. Jack is hit on by his wife’s friend. Caroline strikes gold with one of the best tag lines in movie history. “Schooner Tuna, the tuna with a heart.” Classic. [If you have the full transcript of this commercial, please share.]
The point of the commercial shouldn’t be lost on marketers today. It is really easy to turn to price drops to increase demand for products and services in a down economy, but at what cost? If you positioned your brand as the high-end, quality solution, a price cut may do more harm than good.
Car makers, phone companies, clothing stores and more have turned to the Schooner Tuna approach. Schooner dropped prices, temporarily, to lend a hand to working moms (and dads) with the promise that it would raise prices when the economy turned upwards. America was coming out of the 1970s slump at the time, so the movie made sense.
Virgin offers pink-slip protection, Saturn, Hyundai and others have car payment assurance plans. If you get fired no worries they say, we’ll take the car back or let you keep it. What are dealers going to do with inventory on the lot anyway?
Will this approach work? Only time will tell.
As for VLG, our customers and prospects continue to ask us to slash prices citing tighter budgets. We positioned ourselves as a quality alternative to HTML landing pages and junk mail. We offer ourselves as much margin as makes sense in this ecoomy, but can’t go giving away the store to win or keep business. Instead we’ve chosen to vary our offering.
Multiple branches, custom actionscript, .Net manipulation of our application used in the past give way to smaller sites that deliver the slightly less functionality. This way we get to focus on delivering the best creative. Steady development and execution keep us from losing money on smaller deals where our margins are thin.
We obviously believe it does make sense for some of our clients to build robust sites. If you’re going to extend this program to your channel partners it makes sense to build a larger, more complicated microsite. Our quality, even on a small scale, beats the pants of traditional junk mail and static lead qual, form submit landing pages.
VLG stands for quality and effectiveness. We offer creative solutions to blunt the impact of this economy and recommend our customers do the same. Don’t sacrifice yourself on the alter of low prices. It could have far reaching consequences.
My fellow Americans. I am Howard Humphrey, President of Schooner Tuna. All of us here at Schooner Tuna sympathize with all of you hit so hard by these trying economic times. In order to help you we are reducing the price of Schooner Tuna by 50 cents a can. When this crisis is over, we will go back to our regular prices. Until then, remember, we’re all in this together. Schooner Tuna. The tuna with a heart.