Saturday, January 13, 2007

Dolce & Gabbana, its marketing age of grotesque?

I just saw the new posters launched by the clothing firm Dolce & Gabanna, the ones that are supposed to make people feel the desire of buying more of the products they sell. They're supposedly inspired in the Napoleonic era, which is not a bad idea. However, I think that the result was catastrophic. Here is one of the posters released:
How do you like it? Do you feel like buying Dolce & Gabbana's products after seeing the poster? Personally, I don't. I just can't understand what was the marketing team thinking of when they approved this type of posters, that clearly cheer violence. That is pretty notorious if you notice the corpse with a bullet in the head at the bottom of the image (which you can click to enlarge). You can realize that he was shot by the guy hugging the naked girl, who is also holding a gun in his hand. And what does the other fellow with a knife in his hand, clearly about to stab the individual sitting at the right side, have to do in the scene? A little extra cheering for violence, of course.
In fact, I'd say overall that the combination of colors is pretty dark, not even inviting to see the ad, and even less to buy clothes. I think that what they tried to achieve is some sort of "shock marketing", but with an awful approach.
Here is another image worth to see:

Let's analyze this one: For instance, what we have here is a scene where apparently the woman lying on the naked guy's lap is dead or something. At the very left side, a youngster reading some document (a will, maybe?), while a lady standing at the center listens to the reading. The girl standing behind the naked guy sees the corpse, while the sitting female and the guy standing at the far right side of the image have nothing to do with the supposed context.
Now, that's creative and appealing. First of all, we have the violence thing back, showing the corpse as the main character. The naked guy has totally nothing to do with the Napoleonic eras; if you see carefully, you'll notice that he's wearing a crown made of golden olive leafs around his head, pretty typical of the Roman era (and why the hell is he naked? There's no point on having a naked individual on this one!). Again, the color mix is terrible, very dark, not appealing at all.
A final sample of the campaign:
There's no need to have a specific analysis of what's depicted there: dead people (apparently three), and some other individuals standing like if they weren't aware of the situation.
From what I see in these images, I can tell that I don't feel like buying Dolce & Gabbana clothing soon. This is probably the sickest, creepiest, most poorly thought and depicted advertisement campaign that I've ever seen for a clothing company. Not even American Apparel's posters, which normally contain some questionable exhibitions, reach this level of grotesque.
I'm not the only one complaining about it, it seems that in England the posters weren't cheered by the consumers as well. The Advertising Standards Authority will probably rule at some point that the content of the images is not appropriate. What a waste of money by Dolce & Gabbana, if I were them, I would really reconsider to have the actual personnel at the marketing department!
What are your feelings after seeing this campaign? Do you feel appealed to buy Dolce & Gabbana's products?

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