All:
The marketing team, including the Vice President of marketing, have all been sacked. Internal job applications will be posted. If no suitable candidates emerge from our talent pool, we’ll look outside the company.
It is painfully obvious based on their latest attempt at a “marketing strategy” that they have no idea what we should be doing from a marketing standpoint.
Children and adults both buy our candy.
They believed that our current marketing strategy appealed only to the former.
They believed that with our emphasis on bright colors, happy advertisements, and emphasis on “light,” that we were alienating large markets based on numbers that recently suggested we were underperforming in the teenage and young adult markets.
Those age groups find marketing strategies that appeal to “edginess” and “darkness” more suitable to their tastes.
But that’s the thing about teenagers and young adults, isn’t it?
In the end, that time in our lives is always nothing more than a detour.
At any rate, our former marketing team first considered, then designed, then had the audacity at our quarterly meeting to pitch to me this “dark, new, and edgy” version of O’Toole Candy.
Let me make something abundantly clear to all of you, lest you fuck up your job interview should you decide to submit an internal application.
O’Toole Candy has only ever updated its image marginally.
Our jingle has been the same regardless of the genre its played in.
And our advertising has always been happy and friendly, and sugarcoated in naivete.
Why?
Because our years of appreciating darkness instead of light, and edginess over happiness, are a detour.
As children, darkness is scary and edginess makes us uneasy. Through our innocence, we understand that light is a fine thing, and that happiness is one of the most preferable states of being.
As adults, we are acutely aware of just how much darkness there is. And while adults by and large consider edginess “cool,” especially in art, we would trade being cool for being happy ten out of ten times.
When children see our logo, when they hear our jingle, they are drawn to it because they are light and happy.
But when adults see our logo? When they hear our jingle? They are brought back to their childhood, and through nostalgia find themselves feeling happy and wanting to buy our products.
You see, a preference for darkness.
A… Desire for edginess?
Its an immature detour from who we really are.
We need never to market to teenagers.
Because they will one day return to the light.
And that is why the light will always beat the dark in our marketing strategy.
Because the light always beats the dark in our lifelong preferences.
People want to be happy.
People want to enjoy life.
And we believe that in the end, when a child enters adulthood, if something dark in them is holding them back from happiness, ultimately, they’ll rip it out of themselves and leave it for dead.
I look forward to reviewing your applications.
-Teddy O’Toole