This spot begins: “When you’re a coach in the NFL…” And then I stop listening, because I’m not a coach in the NFL, and I’m never going to be one, either. So why should I listen to a commercial that’s specifically aimed at a group of people I’m not a part of? (Kind of makes me feel like I'm eavesdropping on someone else's private conversation!) And seeing as how it’s such a small and exclusive group of people, perhaps putting an ad that’s aimed specifically at them on network television is overdoing it a bit. I mean, I guess they watch TV like everyone else, but I’d think direct marketing might reach them more effectively, like for example, sending them all a free sample of NyQuil. And think of all the money it’s costing Vick’s (the makers of NyQuil) to run an ad on TV for everyone else to see, when it’s only meant to be seen by NFL Football team coaches! That just seems like a lot of wasted dollars right there; because after all, football coaches could only buy so much NyQuil anyway, right? And that wouldn’t even begin to cover the costs of what they spent to run this ad on TV! See what I mean?
But you know, maybe their plan is to reach all the rest of us somehow, by getting the football coaches to use their product, see how good it is, then hope that the coaches will tell their players about it, that the players will try it and like it, and that the players would then tell all their fans about it: you know, kind of like a “trickle-down” effect. But if that’s what they wanted to do, why not aim the ads at football fans, and then when the fans use and like the product, when they see the players or coaches have colds, then maybe the fans will tell them about it, and they’ll reach the top, like a “trickle-up” strategy? That might get them even more consumers purchasing their product, even if the coaches never did buy it. But I guess they just want the NFL coaches to buy it, for whatever reason. I guess they just like them better than the rest of us.
I don’t know, but it just seems like a whole lot of effort to make and run a television commercial on network and cable TV just to try to get the NFL Football coach market. I understand if the hoi polloi isn’t good enough for their products, but wouldn’t they get more business of they included college football coaches as well? Well, they left them out, so the college coaches are going to use Alka Seltzer Plus cold medicine instead, because they’ll be offended that they were thought of as not good enough to rate a mention in the NyQuil ad, right? And even if that’s not why they weren’t mentioned, they’ll probably feel that way anyway, which seems like a missed opportunity and an unnecessary slight. Yes, I’m afraid I think this whole plan to focus exclusively on the NFL Football coach market is going to yield some disappointing sales figures for NyQuil. In fact, I just think this whole strategy wasn’t very well thought out. I don’t mean to be critical, but maybe next time they ought to focus on a more diverse or ubiquitous market in their television advertising. After all, the so-called unwashed masses are the ones who watch the most TV anyway, so they’re the ones who are most likely to see the commercials and buy the product.
But who knows: maybe they only made enough NyQuil for the NFL coaches, and they didn’t want the rest of us to want to buy it, since there isn’t enough for us anyway. Maybe that’s what’s really going on here, but they didn’t want to say anything about it, since that would make them seem like incompetent planners, and then we might suspect that they wouldn’t be any good at formulating multi-symptom nighttime cold medicine either. I guess you never know why companies make the decisions they do unless you’re an insider.
Here’s the coughing coach's cold-combating concoction commercial:
