Marketing Rules!

I work as an office manager, which makes me a juicy target market. On a typical day, I receive all sorts of random sales calls, junk mail, and spam. I love it. As marketing gets more and more targeted, and the sheer volume of information increases, the attempts to reach me just get weirder and louder.

Oh, there’s the usual stuff, like growing my penis, reducing my debt, or finding love the Christian way. But the best spam I ever saw landed in my inbox today. Celebrate Memorial Day with a Honey Baked Ham! There’s no better way to honor America’s fallen heroes than with…pork products.

So now I’m wondering what product tie-ins I’ll get for the rest of the holidays. Viagra for Valentine’s? Should I honor Father’s Day with a Nigerian bank scam? Hey, let’s celebrate Halloween with some high-quality toner cartridges!

I’ve also been trying to figure out how in hell the ham marketers come up with this Memorial Day campaign. Did the marketing team conduct some sort of study? Maybe they did a focus group, where they asked participants to brainstorm new ham-centric holidays. Easter and Christmas are a given, but why not have an Arbor Day ham? Or maybe they paid an outside consultant to come up with a new campaign, “Ham: Not Just for Jesus Any More.”

Either way, I don’t see myself buying a ham for Memorial Day. Saint Walpurgis Day, however, is a definite hamworthy holiday. Well played, Honey Baked Ham people. Well played.