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Strawman Product
- 65 statements
- 10 feature instances
- 6 referencing feature instances
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Are you worried that people won't think your product is the greatest thing since sliced bread? Do you feel that your product won't sell if people think a rival product is good enough, especially if it's the leading brand? Then you should try the all new miracle advertising method of the Strawman Product! Take flaws that most people find mere annoyances, or outright make flaws up, and crank them up to So Bad, It's Horrible levels. While your work will only have a beautiful fresh shine with every use. Soon people will begin to wonder how they even functioned using the other, godawful products. These are some of the exciting uses for this method: Having everyone in the ad prefer your product. Portraying the rival product as uncool. Making it look as though the product is impossible to use, even though it seems those people are just Too Incompetent to Operate a Blanket. Making it look as though the product can't do something your product can easily do, even though nobody would ever use it that way in real life. For political ads, portraying the opposing candidate or position as a Strawman Political. Scapegoat Ad: When part of the competitor is made to represent the whole. This marketing technique has served over one million customers already! So call now, and get the hottest trend in bullshi... we mean marketing, today, for just three easy payments of 29.99! Strawman Product is not legal in every country. Do not inhale, swallow, or taunt Strawman Product. Subtrope of Competing Product Potshot, which doesn't always get this intense. Compare Absolute Comparative, where this is avoided by declining to mention exactly what your product is better than. Contrast Our Product Sucks. |
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Dropped link to AnalogyBackfire: Not an Item - FEATURE | |
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| Strawman Product / int_261c8d3f | type |
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| Strawman Product / int_261c8d3f | comment |
Parodied on The Simpsons; the family visits EPCOT and goes on an educational ride about electric cars, sponsored by "the oil companies of America". The ride, which moves slow and jerkily, proclaims that as an electric car it's slow, can't go very far, and that if you drive it everyone will think you're gay. | |
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Johnny Turbo of the TurboGrafx-16 and his attempts to punch out the evil corporation of Sega who sold kids the Sega CD solely to see the look of despair on their little faces when they realized they needed a Sega Genesis to use it. Sega was this trope back in the days. More than half their ads were just bashing their rival company (usually Nintendo) in 'creative' ways. We all know the 'Genesis does what Nintendon't' one, which chastised the NES for being 8 bits lower than the Genesis. When the SNES came out, they found the only thing they could say was better about the Genesis was its slightly lower price, so they included a kid screaming at this 'higher price' in fear. Even though they were only about $50 (one game) apart. There was also a commercial that negatively compared the game library of the SNES to the Genesis, despite one having been around for years and the other being a fairly recent release. And let's not forget ... the Genesis's DMA controller had BLAST PROCESSING.note The whole "Blast Processing" bit actually did have some merit behind it; the Genesis's base CPU was significantly faster than that of the SNES, and it showed quite noticeably in early fourth-gen multiplatform titles. However, the SNES managed to catch up fairly quickly thanks to it being designed to support a myriad of enhancement chips in its cartridges, with the most common ones being co-processors that ran quite better than the standalone Genesis. The above one was later remade for a Sonic Mania Plus commercial, updating the games the man was selling to a first-person Finger Gun game loaded with "microtransactions, paid DLC, and loot boxes" against a colorful platformer in slick retro 2D. They didn't forget to mention it's "The highest rated Sonic game in 15 years", or the 29.99 price tag.note Which was, ironically, paid DLC if you already bought the base game. And then there was the Game Gear versus the Game Boy, as seen through the eyes of a dog: "If you were colorblind and had an IQ of less than twelve, then you wouldn't care which portable you had. Of course, you wouldn't care if you drank from the toilet, either." On a side note, as the Nerd pointed out 3DO Interactive Multiplayer ads went out of their way to say that the SNES and Genesis were just toys compared to the awesomeness of the 3DO. |
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Parodied in an episode of Mr. Show, where a national chain of supermarkets runs an increasingly slanderous series of ads against their mom-and-pop competitor. Among their boasts is that at their store, unlike at certain other stores, you'll always find apples, rats don't crawl all over the food, homeless people won't defecate in the aisles, and your children will not be kidnapped by a white slavery ring. | |
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MAD parodied the rivalry between car rental companies Avis and Hertz in The '70s with a "war" of insulting ads between the two. The punchline was that the companies have actually staged the rivalry to monopolize people's attention, and having done so they proceed to merge and move on to crushing all the smaller car rental companies. In The '80s, they recycled the premise and punchline to poke fun at the Coke-Pepsi rivalry. | |
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On a side note, as the Nerd pointed out 3DO Interactive Multiplayer ads went out of their way to say that the SNES and Genesis were just toys compared to the awesomeness of the 3DO. | |
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In 1993, there were Taco Bell commercials featuring Rocky and Bullwinkle where Boris and Natasha tried to bore people while selling MicBoris burgers, with Rocky and Bullwinkle thwarting the duo's schemes by buying Taco Bell tacos and claiming that "burgers are boring". | |
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For a while, Total was fond of counting how many extra bowls of other cereals one would need to eat for the same amount of nutrition (savagely parodied by the Saturday Night Live ad for Colon Blow cereal). | |
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When the '98 American Godzilla movie came out, some TV stations ran brief reports over the history of the Godzilla franchise to promote it, showing clips from some of the more shoddy Japanese films (such as Godzilla's infamous tail-slide scene from Godzilla vs. Megalon or the ugly-looking monster suits from Son of Godzilla) in an effort to make the new movie's drastic reimagining of the title character more attractive to modern audiences. Essentially, these reports aimed to poke fun at the "old and inferior" Godzilla by deliberately focusing on the lowest points of his "career", contrasting them with the "new and improved" American version. | |
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This famously backfired in 2010 with an advertisement for the racing game Blur. The ad began with a Shallow Parody of Mario Kart, complete with Game Boy style music and sound effects and cutesy characters, with one proclaiming "Racing's not about winning! It's about making friends!"note Nevermind that Mario Kart is about as competitive as racing games get - right down to the fact that it's a weapons-based racer The idea was that blur was a "grown up racing game for the big boys." But, instead, the characters in the Mario Kart parody wound up becoming more popular than the game itself. And the commercial garnered some unexpected controversy when Nintendo president Reggie Fils-Aime himself deemed it offensive, given that his children were fans of Mario Kart. While the game was positively reviewed by most media outlets, it sold poorly and wound up bankrupting Bizarre Creations. | |
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The Canadian webseries "Knuckleheads" has a commercial for the Willy-Waller 2006, a small utensil that makes peeling potatoes much easier (it should, as it's... a potato peeler). How do they demonstrate its superiority? By showing one guy peeling with the Willy-Waller 2006 side-by-side with... a guy using his fingernails. Sold in sets of 14 for $120. | |
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The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.
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Advertising Tropes | |
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Self-Demonstrating Article | |
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The War on Straw | |
| Johnny Turbo (Comic Book) / int_35ba2b17 | type |
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| Nintendo Power Promo Videos / int_35ba2b17 | type |
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| Mr. Show / int_35ba2b17 | type |
Strawman Product |
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Copyright of data TVTropes.org contributors under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.