Monthly Archive for July, 2005

Last weekend I was at the mall with my daughters, scarfing down pizza at Sbarro’s (which proudly states on it’s website that it’s the world’s largest mall restaurant chain).

Not that I’m a regular at Sbarro’s but I noticed they’d put up new artwork (if you could call it that), specifically pictures of (presumably) Momma Sbarro at the counter of the original Sbarro’s somewhere in the deep dark past of restaurant marketing lore.

Now I have no way of knowing if there was or wasn’t a Momma Sbarro at the counter of the original Sbarro’s in Rome in the 1940s. The corporate web site says the first store opened in 1977.

Creating a mythical past seems to be the thing to do for restaurant marketing. Seth Godin cites the example of Red Lobster saying they’re from Maine when they don’t even have a restaurant there. I know of one restaurant around here that refuses to admit they are part of a chain.

Sounds all nice, like Captain Scrappy is hauling in the catch of the day fresh for the Bar Harbor store. But does anyone really care when all they want is shopping mall pizza or a cheap and halfway decent seafood meal? In the end I suppose there’s a world of difference between clever and stupid, or between telling a good story and spinning marketing bullshit.

Technorati Tags: marketing

In his must read ‘Long Tail’ blog, Chris Anderson recounts the horror that is a trip to WalMart’s music section.

In a world of plenty – all the buying muscle that WalMart can flex – Anderson finds nothing but banality and only a handful (around 5,000) of the more than 800,000 titles one can find on Amazon, for example.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the music long tail, the Fairfield County Weekly reports that local record shops are hanging in, barely.

I’ve written about this before but it warrants repeating, especially in the context of public / media relations and marketing – increasingly there are two cultures. One is at the head of the long tail where they shop at WalMart, watch cable news and have PCs infected with spyware.

The other is at the end of the long tail. They shop online from places like Cafe Press or Archie McPhee, get their news from Memeorandum and scour eBay for Joy Division flexi-disks.

I’m generalizing of course but for those of us who think about the ‘public’ in public relations, it’s increasingly important to understand the difference between the mass market and the micro markets that are emerging. Sometimes your audience is shopping at WalMart, other times they’re at Trash American Style hunting down that elusive Black Flag EP.

Technorati Tags: culture, long tail, marketing, public relations