A tweet from PR handler Adam Keats of Weber Shandwick today took me to an article by folksy writer Garrison Keillor that talked about the Dominos video blow-up . Keillor’s takeaway is that it’s ‘snot a big deal’ and everyone should just relax. At some level, Garrison’s obviously right. There’s no way that video was the grossest thing uploaded to YouTube that hour, let alone day, so how on earth could it be a big deal?
Yet it is a big deal. It wasn’t news just among information desperate twitterers or the media or district attorneys, this was meaningful to hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. At Expo, we asked our members what they thought of the Dominos video and they told us that, yes, it was a big deal. Knowing our opinionated members, if it was no big deal, they’d tell us…no big deal. But they didn’t. Their noses were crinkled and their nausea was palpable.
So what’s the difference between a thousand Saturday Night Live gross-out skits and this video? It’s simple. It’s the brand. It’s the fact that, no matter how much we say we’re immune to advertising and branding and all that stuff, brands matter to us and they matter a lot. This wasn’t non descript cafeteria food, this was Dominos. And of course the most powerful component in restaurant branding is consistency; a consistency now marked in Dominos case with images that many of us will struggle to get out of our minds. We’d love to intellectualize it away as irrelevant, not representative, but the beauty and power of brands is that….we can’t.
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