CFO: So as you can see, examining a regression analysis of the factorial ANOVA yields a product-moment correlation coefficient -

CEO: Yeah, yeah, I think we get the idea. People don’t like brown Zunes, even though they have the same 30GB hard drives and wide-screen 3” LCDs as the white and black ones. So how do we turn that steaming pile of brown Zunes into a steaming pile of cash? How do we make America fall in love with brown?

Communications Guy: Having a brainstorm here! Check out this tagline: “What can brown do for -” oh, wait, never mind.

Creative Director: Well, technically they aren’t brown at all. In graphic terms, they’re somewhere between bistre and raw umber. Can we do anything with that?

CFO: No, I think not. Raw umber is one of Crayola’s least profitable crayons.

CEO: Maybe we do a little marketing jujitsu here. People love bulldogs because they’re so ugly. Bags of defective jellybeans sell just as well as the regular ones. And the most valuable stamp in the world is the one with the airplane printed upside down.

Communications Guy: I’m feeling the creativity here! So wrong, it’s right! So bad, it’s good! So gross, it’s not gross! Brown is the new black!

Creative Director: Nope, yellow is the new black this year. Brown isn’t scheduled to be the new black until 2014.

CFO: I guess maybe we could say that you’ll never get your MP3 player mixed up with somebody else’s, because who in their right mind owns a brown MP3 player?

CEO: Not bad, not bad…

Creative Director: And maybe we emphasize the advantages of the product itself, and how the color of the casing doesn’t matter nearly as much as the functionality inside -

Communications Guy: Wait! Stop everything! Mindflash! We wrap the Zune in tinfoil and call it “audio chocolate”. Everybody loves chocolate! Zap! Problem solved! What’s for lunch?

CEO: I was thinking more like, if you’re carrying it in your back pocket, and you, like, have a, you know, personal, uh, accident, then you don’t have to worry about stains -

CFO: Ew!

Creative Director: Do you always have to go too far?

CFO: Crunching the data here, it all points to one piece of marketing strategy as the silver bullet – or brown bullet, if you will – to kill our overstock brown-Zune vampire.

Communications Guy: Hey! Silver bullets kill werewolves! You need a stake through the heart to kill a vampire!

Creative Director: I knew there was a reason we hired you.

CFO: Use whatever metaphor you want. The point is, there’s really only one angle we can take to convince people to set aside their preconceptions and buy brown Zunes.

CEO: A series of eight blog posts about the Zune procurement and distribution process?

Communications Guy: A long-winded, self-indulgent product description full of clumsy, irrelevant jokes?

Creative Director: A site redesign to change the color scheme to brown? Celebrity endorsements? Free puppies? What?

CFO: Sell them cheaper than the black & white ones.

CEO: Hmm. Yeah. Seems like a hopeless gimmick to me. Kind of pathetic, really. But we’re not exactly bursting with ideas, so I guess, yeah, go ahead. What the hell.

CFO: Done!

Communications Guy: Bam! Pow! Boo-yah!

Creative Director: How did we get to be so brilliant?

Back to top