The Adjustable Productions Business Blog

Back in the 80’s when adverts were generally brilliant, and agencies in the UK had mastery of a concept known as irony, there used to be quite a popular series of 20 second spots for the ‘Mr Muscle’ brand of bathroom and kitchen cleaners. The tag revolved around the user of these goods being a rather weedy looking spectacled man, usually dressed in a string vest and shorts:

These adverts were quite a phenomenon, and achieved with distinction what all advertising agencies should surely aspire to: They entered the national psyche.

School children would use ‘Mr Muscle’ to describe the wimpy kids in the class. Workmen who were struggling to saw a piece of wood would get cat calls of “you need to get in the Mr Muscle for that job”. Anyone with a pair of glasses, or pair of shorts or vest that had less than a herculean figure would be known as a ‘Mr Muscle’. The campaign work fantastically well as it got across the message that the product was something that anybody could use to get good results.

And now, 20 years later, in the homogenised era where we seem to share our poorly redubbed adverts with Spain, Germany and most of the rest of Europe, we have this regressive offering:

The funny thing is that Gerald Home (the actor playing Mr Muscle in the previous advert) is much more of a man than the new, beefed up, multi-lingual computer sprite Mr Muscle will ever be. In reality, that Mr Muscle is actually no more than a tennis ball on a stick waived around in front of the actress.

One of the reasons this does not work is because the previous series of adverts were so successful that a sufficient part of the target audience still remember them. Their first reaction to this advert is therefore likely to be “what is this rubbish?”. They would probably do a lot better rerunning or repurposing the old adverts (something which a few brands such as Ariel and Felix have been doing recently).

Interestingly, this version, which appears to be in Russian, seems to allude to the old ways of the Communist era athletes ‘training’ programs…

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 17th, 2009 at 1:25 pm and is filed under Marketing and adverts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.