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Pssst. Want something that earns respect
and fear? The mere utterance of its name
has rung alarm bells in otherwise hushed rooms
around Big Ben.
The terrifying, spine-chillingly
horrendous …
hoody!
Where once nightclub bouncers
turned away people wearing sneakers, now UK
shopping centres like Bluewater close its doors
to any child whose sports top incorporates a
fiendish hood.
None of this has come as shock
to me. As a child I was weaned on understanding
the true terror of ‘the hood’. After all,
I watched Thunderbirds.
The nation is on hood-alert.
But where there’s a hood, there’s hope.
Mr Blair supports Bluewater. What’s more his
deputy, John Prescott, also supports the initiative.
Recently it was reported that Mr Prescott experienced
the shock of confronting a child in a hood first
hand. John was in a café enjoying a nice cup
of tea and piece of toast when suddenly, from
beyond the hat stand, a group of hoodies appeared.
Luckily our lad kept his nerve and summoned
his bodyguards to protect his last slice of
toast.
Now that the nation’s officially
‘most wanted’ is no longer Al Qaeda but Alan
and his crew from Wood Green, I wonder how the
marketing community can help prevent the good
consumers of our fair land from experiencing
too many nightmares about sweatshirt tops with
integrated hoods – some even featuring petrifying
plastic bits at the end of each strand of string!
How about putting a premium
price on sweatshirts that don’t have an integrated
hood? We could badge them with an official
‘Hoody free’ emblem.
Or we could get the boys and
girls at outlets like Matalan, J-D Sports and
Debenhams to run commercials for worried mums
and dads:
Voice over
(Female Scottish accent for that added warmth
and sincerity).
Busy mums have so much
on their minds these days.
Sound effects: Kitchen.
Washing machine is on in the background.
Mum:
Tom started wearing odd
things that worried me. First it was a
simple t-shirt with the slogan “Dyslexics
of the world untie.” Matters worsened.
Later I pulled out one reading “Can I lick your
forehead?” (Holds back the tears). The
other day… whilst sorting out his whites…
My heart sunk. There, in the middle
of the washing basket I felt something clammy.
It was warm, baggy and
smelt like ready-salted crisps and kebabs.
I could feel the hairs rise on the back of my
neck. Every fear for my kids started hurtling
towards me like a hoard of housewives waving
packets of coupons for ten per cent off chicken
roasters.
It was a sweatshirt.
But thank heavens, my son was clean – it was
hoodyless.
Female voice over:
All our sweatshirts and
tops have been stringently checked for hoodies.
So even if your teenagers have gone off their
five portions of fruit a day, you can still
be sure they are on the straight and narrow.
Male Voice Over:
Hoodies: Don’t keep it
under your hat. Wear our reassurance on your
sleeve.
Another way
Alternatively, marketers could
use the ‘hoody’ device to ‘blaps-up’ a tired
product. For example, now that the hype
over Anakin evolving into Darth Vader is all
over, why not egenerate sales from the original
movie. Slap up posters outside schools
showing how Princess Leia wasn’t as ‘vanilla’
as some thought. No way. This ‘shorty’
was ‘the original bad girl in da hood’.
Why stop there? Introduce
the lucrative youth market to an even ‘heavier’
range of threads like street-cred green tights
a la ‘large’ Errol Flynn’s Robin Hood style.
Imagine: Teenagers tucking
i-pods into the brims of their feathered hats,
strutting in their stuff in ‘mean ‘n’ lean’
scarlet green, outside the local fish and chip
shop. Respect!
Now we are really targeting
at the speed of a marketer’s arrow.
And if you are worried that
the potential for marketing hoody culture is
as limited as the imagination of your average
Southend Chav, think again: A vast hidden
market of oldie Hoodys is ready and willing
to wear your logo on their lids: Trappist
monks.
Thanks to your brilliantly
targeted marketing, monks can start earning
respect from a wider demographic beyond their
cloisters. Their hoodys could feature
a sloglan reading, ‘ I is DA Devinci Code”
You could even market their homeboy wares such
as hand-made monk’s bread, sealed with a ‘hoody-
approved’ logo stuck on the packaging.
So once again, thanks to your
targeting insights, what is currently a ‘phantom
menace’ could become a brand champion, so great
that before long even the most respected people
in the land – Marketing Directors (who else???)
– will start giving a ‘big-up’ at meetings with
their 7Ps posse.
Jonathan Gabay is on CIM’s
core faculty.
Be sure to checkout his website:
www.gabaywords.com
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