Market Sexmentation

Have you seen the recent Carl's Junior ad featuring the schoolteacher who does a dirty dance for the class?

I guarantee she would never pass for MY homeroom teacher. Apparently this is the burger chain's latest promotion for their new Patty Melt (a patty with two flat buns) featuring the rap song "I Like Flat Buns." This isn't the first racy exposure from Carl's. Remember Paris Hilton? If getting attention is the goal of this campaign, I'd have to give them a passing grade. The Tennessee Education Association demanded that they pull the ads and they have raised the ire of many in the advertising community.

Let's be honest, alienating the people outside of your target audience is a byproduct of controversial ads Often times campaigns such as these are aimed at highly profitable market segments such as teens. We may not realize it but teens spent $139 billion on consumer products just last year. So in essence this is just an ad campaign that is highly targeted to a very affluent, albeit young, audience. Carl's is just practicing well crafted market segmentation. Or is that market sexmentation?

Wikipedia defines "market segmentation" as the process in marketing of dividing a market into distinct subsets (segments) that behave in the same way or have similar needs. Because each segment is fairly homogeneous in their needs and attitudes, they are likely to respond similarly to a given marketing strategy. That is, they are likely to have similar feelings and ideas about a marketing mix comprised of a given product or service, sold at a given price, distributed in a certain way and promoted in a certain way.

Oh yes, these teens have similar feelings alright!

So what do you think? Did Carl's go too far with this ad? Should teachers be offended? Or is it just a funny commercial?

Take a look at the video here and give us your comments.

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Have a great week!

-Mark Deo