Toothpaste. I like mine with breath strips and green gel. You like yours with red stripes and bi-carb soda (for that whitening sensation). That’s cool, different toothpastes are pretty easy to tell apart, look at them on the supermarket shelves and they’re all vying for attention in different ways, trying to out-brighten and out-whiten each other. There’s no confusion. No company makes their toothpaste look like any other company’s. It’s all minty freshness, and a few crazy oddball flavours thrown in the mix from time to time (Zest Impact anyone?).

Mints, on the other hand, exist in an entirely different void. I saw these at the local cafe yesterday and was puzzled:

I made a purchase, wondering what brand manager in their right mind thought it would be a good idea to position a product with exactly the same packaging, shape, size and flavour as Tic-Tacs and then allow them to be sold for $2 (Two Dollars!) at Brisbane coffee shops. I was going to write a blog entry about it and ask if their daring design would prompt anyone else to buy them, just out of interests sake. I was going to offer whatever was left of the contents up as a prize to the reader with the best answer.

Before I hit ‘publish’ I decided to quickly search the web and see just which company was behind ‘Flirt’, and what information I could gather on the ‘Jigz’ product line (which, to be honest, looked alarmingly like the sort of generic brand name you’d come up with if all the other ones were taken, despite their official-looking trademark symbols). But no information was to be found. Nil. Nothing. Google didn’t know they existed. Google image search revealed only some wannabe rappers. How could this be? Was I on the receiving end of a product so daring, so cool and so cheeky it existed only in the real world, with no actual online marketing campaign and no multi-million dollar website? Was this 100% pure guerilla marketing with distrubution at only the hippest, underground Valley cafes?

No, sadly it was not.

Just before I hit publish and went about my day I turned the pack over to see if I could find the address of the manufacturer. Hidden in the fine print, the second last word after the coluring information, was the word ‘Aldi’. “FLIRT is a registered trademark and JIGZ is a trademark of ALDI Stores”. I hadn’t discovered a daring new mint, I’d been ripped off by a cafe too tight to buy proper mints and a discount food chain with so little publicity and so many lawyers it could get away with it. They weren’t cheekily ripping off Tic-Tacs as part of a marketing campaign for cool people, they were cheekily ripping off Tic-Tacs as part of a marketing campaign for poor people. Cheeky fuckers.

Tags: aldi, tic-tacs

This entry was posted on Friday, May 22nd, 2009 at 11:51 am and is filed under Branding. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.