[Orchids & Onions] Getting it right needn't be a taxing task

Like the KwaZulu-Natal cleaning company Drizit earlier this year, when it clumsily tried to make commercial capital out of Zulu King Goodwill Zwelithini's xenophobic remarks - and brought a storm of protest down on its head.

Another area that is close to the bone is crime - and any brand using that part of culture and society does so at its peril. There are plenty of people who have been victims - and no matter what spin you put on it, they won't be impressed.

At first, I had mixed feelings about Volkswagen's new radio ad for its "Genuine spare parts" campaign.

It features two anxious, suburban voices. What's that sound? I don't know. What are we going to do? Bark like a dog. Woof! No - a bigger dog. WOOOF! No, an even bigger dog! GROWWWWLLL!

© Jose Wilson Araujo – 123RF.com

Then the punch line: don't use substitutes, use the real thing. It gets the job done. It does make the point, though: use a fake part and you could end up in the same predicament as the suburban dog imitators.

It is risky, but it works, because the situation is so absurd as to be obviously completely removed from reality. So that takes the sting out of the crime allusions. So, an Orchid to VW.

Some of the busiest tweeters these days are the people from Joburg City Power - especially around load-shedding time - and when the power doesn't come back on when it should.

That happened to us this week in area 8B: the lights came back... for a minute, then went off again, then came on 10 minutes later, only to go off less than a minute after that. So it continued for more than an hour.

A colleague, sports writer Kevin McCallum, was fuming at them on Twitter. So I decided to share my recipe for dealing with the unexpected, extended power outages. I wrote that this included: "1 fire. 1 book. 1 glass of red wine. Zero expectations."

Not long afterwards, I saw that the energetic folks at the Joburg City Power social media desk had "favourited" my Tweet. Do you guys not get irony? Did you not notice the "Zero expectations" bit - which was aimed squarely at you?

While I am flattered, naturally, that you favourited me, redistributing criticism of your brand is not clever marketing. So you get an Onion.

Finally, I am reversing the trend of the past few years of awarding the SA Revenue Service (Sars) an Orchid for its clever, and effective, advertising aimed at getting people to fill in their tax returns.

Its message this week - which ordered: Don't lie on your tax return - was bitterly prescriptive from a department that is tasked with raking in the multiple billions from us (and the biggest slice of state income comes from individual taxpayers) so our government can squander to its heart's content.

Sars used to have campaigns that focused on doing the right thing - but that rings a little hollow when Number One is not apparently doing the right thing to "Pay back the money!", doesn't it?

Also, with so many good people leaving the revenue service and it's now looking more and more like just another lapdog department, how do we know it is doing the right thing?

But please: don't add salt to the increasingly painful duty of paying our dues by ordering us around like serfs.

An Onion for getting your marketing tone dead wrong, Sars.

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