Canidae on Fire at Circuit City

Here’s an update: Office Depot has actually pulled their ad spots with the disembodied hand. Seems like enough bloggers (including yours truly) called them out on its creepiness to have an effect.

More “me too” advertising, but this one has a couple of twists: it’s a two-pronged “me too” approach. It was bound to happen, of course. Slowly but surely, more and more people know about the Firefox browser. Interestingly enough, though, I’ve found that the name Mozilla is not as widely known. Anyway, I guess Firefox has reached the “buzz” stage. You either know about it and use it (whenever possible) or are burning to know what it is and how you can maximise your productivity with it. Or something.

Anyway, given all the buzz and bally-hoo about Firefox, it was inevitable that someone in marketing would think “hey, how can we invoke something that sounds like firefox, for our product/service?” And that person, it turns out, works for Circuit City.

A little background, for those of you not overly familiar with this “Circuit City” thing. If you want circuit boards and resistors and stuff, you might instinctively think “Circuit City”, but you’d be wrong. You’d have to think Radio Shack for that instead.

Circuit City is a chain electronics/entertainment store. You go there to buy CDs, DVDs, games, car audio, home audio, tv’s, and so on. Best Buy is another such chain. And the reason I mention Best Buy is a simple one. A few years ago, a company called Geek Squad got acquired by Best Buy (b2evo won’t let me link to it). The brand is marketed very well (I can not speak to the service provided, as I have no experience with it, nor do I know anyone who has). Essentially, they’ve taken the idea of geeks and brought it somewhat mainstream: geeks as heroes and saviours, if you will. They must be doing fairly well, because it’s been at least 3 years, if not more, and the company is still around and still being marketed fairly aggressively. Here’s the shtick: their army of geeks patrol around in black and white VW beetles and will fix your problems on any day at any time (they also have geeks at the ready in the store, I believe).

Circuit City, then, pulled off their double me-too whammy when they launched their Firedog service. Here’s the shtick: their army of people patrol around in black and green Scion xB’s to fix your problems. You can call them on any day at any time, and they probably also have, um, firedogs at the ready in the store. The fact that they’re trying to associate it with dogs in firehouses doesn’t even make sense, so let’s dispense with that excuse right now.

You know, I don’t necessarily hold copycatting against companies. If executed well and marketed well, I think they’re fine. A good idea is a good idea, and if it works for you then kudos. So, I’m not against Circuit City offering this service. I’m just sickened by their marketing of it. The service is what it is: Geek Squad had a great idea and they capitalised on it. Circuit City saw that and decided to offer such a service to their customers as well. So far, so fine, so good. That Circuit City would then brand this service as “firedog” and then go “well, Geek Squad has VW’s, we’ll have xB’s” and think that sets them apart is just laughable.

So, Circuit City, how many marketing droids got a raise out of this?

As for the commercials, they’re just silly. It’s full of people taking their pet dogs to be retrained, because said animals do not know what “Vista capable” means, or some other such nonsense. My advice: cut your losses on this ridiculous marketing campaign and get a new ad agency fire[dog] the old one. It’s probably too late to rebrand firedog as something more sensible, but in that case take this gift: go with the whole fire/emergency motif and actual firedogs.