is use of sacrasm in marketing dead?
0 voters
there is something to be said for the simple use of blatant sarcasm to make money. Is this product a sign of an overly mature market? Are we to take this lying down… or kneeling?
even though i dont drink that stuff, there’s nothing wrong with bwallz.
My roommate in my first round through college was friends with a distributor and we got cases of teh stuff for nothin…
anyway, I don’t think sarcasm is dead at all. I think a new generation is emerging (meaning perhaps the old one is in fact too mature).
I find a hilarious example of this to be the US commercials that were part of the “truth” campaign against teh tabacco industries, and their new incarnation with the black guy called “whadafxup.”
The same applies the US gov’t commercials about weight loss where kids poke a belly sitting in the sand on a beach because someone walked it off there (and the whole host of commercials that went with those).
As far as a true marketing sense, look at the recent Hyundai commercials…
“We’re a humble car company”
(shows 2 JD Power awards)
“We just need a bigger trophy case”
Or perhaps the VW commercials poking fun at ricer boys in their Hondas.
Aside from cars, there’s commercials for monster.com where the man works with monkeys and the woman works with donkeys (he works with a buncha chimps and she with a buncha jack-asses, haha).
I think sarcasm is a live and kickin (not that i see a correlation between bawls and sarcasm actually)
I thought the same thing actually, were is the sarcasm in that packaging? Seems more like the first thing you think of rather than something clever… which is sarcasm.
uh… that’s my point…and my rant.
The fact that people can get away with a blatant derogatory and misogynistic connotation on a marketed product is beyond my willingness to cope with an obvious imbalance of elements.
The bottle looks like a rip off of some high end wannabe eau de whatever like concoction, yet the name is ridiculous. I’m not saying they are being sarcastic. I’m saying products like this that are marketed this way are irresponsible, regardless of what soapbox or high horse you think i’m on.
The makers of this product don’t care what i think about the name, they just want to attract attention. My opinion is that it’s stupid.
Would you seriously feel comfortable or even confident in a cosmopolitan setting like downtown Vancouver or New York holding a bottle with the word bawls on it? Here drink a bottle of balls…all the teenage humor you want is in there- fine with me…
I don’t think of their bottles as high-end at all, not even rip-offs. Novelty, yes.
Bawls has been around for nearly 10 years now, so to complain now is pointless… they are an established brand in the energy drink market. I don’t see how their design (be it product, marketing, or name badging) is any more worthy of ridicule than “Rockstar,” “RedBull,” or “SoBe.”
I also don’t think their intended market is the cosmo world that you’d laid out. Clearly, based on their marketing strategy, they are aiming their products at college aged people. The majority of their advertising money is in gaming clans and paintballers… things you see everyday in Vancouver and NY 
.
There are products in every sector with morals which you may find objectional in their design/marketing. To make a quite random rant on one that’s striving fine in a market clearly outside of your own sounds like a rant because you had nothing better to do. Perhaps you are just a little to conservative to realize that Bawls is less sexually (or vulgarly) represented than your average “Cosmo” magazine (where sexual secrets and quite revealing photos are displayed free of charge on your local grocery checkout), or perhaps you don’t realize the given connotation of Bawls points to “Paint Bawls” not testicles… way to think in the gutter
The bottle sure looks like a giant dildo (just use a hand to cover the top part).