Marketing Pizza

This is why I could never work in marketing.

“We found that Brooklyners like to eat their pizza differently,” said Dana Harville, a spokeswoman for Domino’s. “They like floppy, large slices, and they fold them into almost a sandwich.”

But that’s no different from the way thousands of people in any of the other boroughs eat a slice. So why call it Brooklyn Style as opposed to, say, Staten Island Style?

“Brooklyn has such a big personality,” she said. “It’s a little different than the Manhattan-style personality. We’re really having a lot of fun with the culture.”

I could never be a marketing spokesperson, because I could never say something like, “Brooklyn has such a big personality. It’s a little different than the Manhattan-style personality. We’re really having a lot of fun with the culture.”

Ugh.

As part of the marketing of that culture, Domino’s has started a couple of contests. One is a drawing for a vintage New York taxi, even though everyone knows it’s almost impossible to hail a cab in Brooklyn.

The rest of the marketing blitz rests on television ads and on a Web site […] which features characters purchased at the Brooklyn Stereotype Store.

An older Italian woman yells out of a brownstone window. A man with the look of an extra from “The Sopranos” pumps iron on the roof. A Rosie O’Donnell lookalike berates a taxi driver for not folding his slice like a man. And there’s an African-American guy. You can’t hear what he’s saying because the rap music pouring from his car speakers is too loud.

That kind of imagery just grinds at Marty Markowitz, the Brooklyn borough president.

“It’s a multinational right-wing company, mass marketing the Brooklyn attitude with obsolete ethnic stereotypes, not to mention flimsy crusts,” he said through a spokesman.

I repeat, ugh.

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