Wendy's Fast Food Restaurants

On a recent trip to Canada, I noticed that Wendy's fast food restaurants has altered their logo for the Canadian market.

The American logo for Wendy's looks like this:

There is a picture of red-haired Wendy with pigtails, above the written "Wendy's" logo.

In Canada, the logo had been slightly altered:

 

The logo is almost the same, except for the maple leaf serving as the apostrophe in the word "Wendy's". The maple leaf indicates the Canadian flag, and thus, Canada. 

I couldn't believe that I had never noticed this slight change before. My family has made numerous trips to Canada over the years, and this was the first time that I had noticed the difference in the logos.

Airport Security Trays

After googling this phenomenon, I feel like I'm a bit late to the party. However, I wanted to show a picture that I recently took at Chicago O'Hare airport.

Zappos has taken advantage of an opportunity to advertize in airports. Before travelers go through security, they must deposit their shoes, phones and other assorted items in these trays. Until yesterday, I had only noticed the dull gray security trays at airports. 

What is incredible about this idea is that the folks at Zappos were definitely thinking outside the box with these campaigns.

Taking advantage of a marketing opportunity like this is a great idea. Making use of something that every single person must look at while going through airport security is absolute genius.

Defying Expectations

I have found a few marketing campaigns and YouTube videos that have defied expectations lately. Whenever a commercial or an ad campaign defies expectations, it seems to be quite powerful and stick in my mind.

Over the weekend, I was talking with some friends about how incredible Amsterdam is. It's a gorgeous city, with beautiful canals and lovely people. Unfortunately, Amsterdam is also famous for some seedier things. No, I'm not worried about tourists smoking weed at the coffee shops. Amsterdam's Red Light District is famous for its prostitutes.

Here is a video that I would like to share. It's based in Amsterdam's Red Light District. This video was very powerful and left quite an impression on me.

Santé

There is something that has been bothering me for a few months. I have noticed a commercial for a rehab center that is located in Texas. Unfortunately, they named it "Santé Center for Healing."

Now, in theory, naming a rehab center after the French word for "health" would have been a good idea. However, if someone had spent about 10 minutes searching online, they might have realized that this word is also used as a toast before drinking alcohol.

When people go to drink alcoholic beverages in France, they say "à votre santé," which means "to your health." They also use "santé" or just "health."

I'm inclined to think that a recovering alcoholic does not need a reminder of a foreign term for toasting as they are trying to stay away from alcohol.

Has anyone else ever noticed a major marketing failure like this in the past?

Österreich

I have been absent for a few weeks, but I haven't stopped thinking about new examples of Marketing Magik and search improvements.

I found a major failure on my part, with regards to German-speaking countries. Somehow I forgot to include Austria, Vienna and its adjectives in both English and in German.

When I searched for "Oesterreich", the German word for Austria, I only got one result. I searched for "Österreich" and got 3 results.




I searched for "oesterreicher", the German word for Austrian and got 21 results:




I searched for "Austria" and for "Austrian" and got 33 results and 15 results, respectively:



Then, when I searched for "Wien", the German word for Vienna, I only got 2 results:



The search for "Vienna" only yielded 8 results. I searched for "Viennese" and only got 8 results.



I decided to combine both the words for Austria, Austrian, Vienna and Viennese in German and in English:



After combining everything, I ended up with 58 results for all of these synonyms:



I then went on to make sure that Swiss, Switzerland, Schweiz, Schweizer and all of the other synonyms gave results on our site. This makes me wonder whether I have covered all of the areas where our products are produced or marketed.