Equanimity

Today I was taking the time to read some of my classmates’ blogs and I came across Debbie’s entry, which talked about Dermablend’s “Go Beyond the Cover”/Zombie Boy promotion. In a nutshell, Dermablend secured Montreal body artist Rick “Zombie Boy” Genest, one of the world’s most tattooed men, to demonstrate the effectiveness of its concealer. Dermablend created a commercial in which Zombie Boy starts out seemingly plain-skinned, but his tattoos are slowly revealed as the Dermablend concealer is removed.

There are a few aspects of this campaign that I think constitute effective marketing techniques:

1. Creating intrigue & capturing attention. I first came across Zombie Boy & this campaign on Tumblr. I normally have no interest in tattoos nor beauty products, but something made me pause on Zombie Boy as I was scrolling through my dashboard (the post looked something like this:)

At first it wasn’t at all clear to me what the sequence of photos was illustrating, but the last image and facial expressions were so striking that I clicked on the Rick Genest tag and was presented the actual commercial:

I believe Zombie Boy was first made famous by a Lady Gaga music video, and this campaign has generated significant additional buzz about something that normally wouldn’t appeal to the masses, which is quite an admirable feat.

2. This campaign displayed Dermablend’s complexity and observability. The complexity & observability of the product were explicity demonstrated through the use of the product to cover up Genest’s full body tattoos (which I’m sure was aided by a little post-production editing). Dermablend also used several message execution styles: creating a mood, using a personality symbol, and showing endorsement/testimonial evidence. As consumers we are often most influenced about a product through other consumer testimonials, and in this case Genest is a sort-of celebrity/authority giving his endorsement/testimonial of sorts by demonstrating his use of the product. It reminded me of last week when I heard the DJs on my morning radio trying out a product called Nanoblur, which is supposed to be a concealer with “Photoshop technology” – because the DJs represent figures of authority for me, I was pretty convinced to go out and grab a few as stocking stuffers for my relatives!

I expect this isn’t the last we’ll be seeing of Zombie Boy or the campaign. He may be doing for zombies (and tattoos?!) what Twilight did for vampires.