"Surprise! You just had an attitudinal shift!" - uh, or at least we hope so...

Marketers are constantly struggling to achieving positive mindspace with their consumers and one of the hardest things to achieve is the attitude shift. Success of an attitude adjustment may not be the key objective for most brands but one thing is for sure, if you can pull it off, you stand to reap serious benefits. It's a tough climb because attitudes by nature are super-sticky. They're formed slowly, over time, based on a sequence of events that tend to reinforce pre-conceived notions. So, if your brand is on the wrong side of an attitude, it takes a long time and a lot of money to re-steer the ship. Unless, of course, you use something more extreme to shake things up. One of those fast-and-loose tactics has been getting a lot of airtime lately: Deception.


Pizza Hut, in order to make sure your attitude towards their new Tuscani Pasta Line doesn't fall into the realm of "cheap", ensnares unsuspecting customers in a fine Italian restaurant and uses hidden cameras to capture the praise from the patrons. Unsurprisingly, the sound bytes that make it to the final cut are more than favorable. And no one seems to mind when the jig is up and they find that they've been duped.

Same thing goes with Carl's Jr/Hardees making the statement that their Prime Rib burgers are so good, you're totally cool dropping $14 bucks for it, because it's "just that good". The camera captures real reaction, real emotion. See it for yourself. Now, how's that attitude of yours towards a Hardee's burger? Better, hmmm?



Now, these tactics are nothing new, Folgers made it famous with their "Switch" commercial where we see a waiter making coffee with Folgers Crystals in place of their typical gourmet coffee. The patrons are asked how they like it and are shocked to learn the truth. Now either the ambiance of the restaurant has got their taste-0-meter out of kilter or the product is better than you'd expect. Maybe a little of both. But when I watch the Pizza Hut spot and see an "authentic" patron exclaim "this is decadent!" about a bacon mac and chee dish, me thinks that you have to consider the source. C'mon lady. Bacon mac and cheese? Decadent? Decadent?! That's the power of editing, a controlled environment, and a restauranteur that doesn't get around much. I'm not questioning that it's not a real reaction, I just expect more from a proxy. Maybe that's why we have professional critics.

Who knows if we'll see more of these switch-style hidden-camera campaigns. Oops. Too late. Hello Windows Mojave! ...or should we say VISTA! (sooooo sneaky) But if the creative well has dried up that much we'll all be looking over our shoulders for Big Brother and his troupe of cameras. (And no, that's not an Apple 1984 reference.) I just think that for now we could use either a little more creativity, a little more honesty or at least some decent 3rd party perspective.

Hyundai's new spot for their next luxury sedan (Genesis) claims it rivals luxury autos that cost four times as much. It goes on to say that if you took the badges off, you would mistake it for a Lexus. But Hyundai didn't say it. Car and Driver did. Hmmm... Now, that may change my attitude.