Collateral Damage or Product Placement?

So the other day I was diving into luxury cars in the Alchemy database and a few anecdotal  but interesting things came up. When looking at the themes for Mercedes-Benz, I saw a few drug related themes. Mainly, they were in conjunction with Mercedes-Benz autos being driven by drug kingpins. Product companies can’t always choose who buys their products and who doesn’t. This is sort of like collateral damage – the image of the product is impacted by some people who buy the product. Think Ryder Truck for an extreme example. However, not all of these sorts of collateral damage events are so high profile as the Oklahoma City bombing. Some are more subtle and keeping an ear to the ground is critical to a) spot these trends and b) conduct  counter messaging to mitigate the collateral damage.

That being said, such events do not always have to be negatives, or better yet, can be spun into a positive. For instance, I also looked at Audi. We saw some similar crime oriented themes bubble to the surface – mainly that it appears that Audi is the chosen getaway car used in some recent bank heists. Unlike the Mercedes-Benz example, this doesn’t have to be a negative. The fact that bank robbers chose the Audi as a getaway car speaks volumes about its high performance and premium sports car handling. This could easily be spun into a edgy web video… Read more »