The product still has to be a good one, but still, were it not for the creative ads, I would have never shopped them.

Not sure who else I can say that about.

This is equally effective for strangling your own sales revenue, resulting in corporate suicide. This is called The Obsorne Effect, named after the late Osborne Company Company the killed itself using this marketing technique.

“Will it blend?” is truly a hallmark of American culture.

It’s also a brilliant marketing campaign. The makers of that blender are the ones who fund the Will It Blend antics. How many advertisements can you count where people on the web flock to see them?

Anyway, the Blackberry/iPhone and Volt/[prius,civic,any decent mileage car] are both classic examples of a company that has no new product to sell so instead is stalling for time. RIMM and GM are both promising some sort of super-duper product “available sometime in the future” so that consumers don’t just go right ahead and buy the competitor’s product, which is available now. Equally true: just because a company says a future product will be superior to the competitor’s current offering doesn’t make it so.

http://www.willitblend.com

The Volt strikes me as a desperation measure, meant to reassure the gullible.