Captain Morgan pose--how it got started! An UPDATE from an "insider"!

Mostly for--and by--marketing and advertising aficionados!

A huge number of blog viewers were attracted to the Captain Morgan story I posted on a few days ago November 16.  If you weren't one of those initial readers, here's the link you need to get up-to-speed, Know about the Captain Morgan pose?  You should--it's very clever marketing!  

A number of people have commented to me on- and off-line.  I thought that the attention and interest in the original blog post would merit a short follow-up and that's the purpose of today's entry:  How the "pose" for the rum brand, Captain Morgan Rum, got started--what it's origins were--in the first place.  

As it turns out--and I didn't know this when I originally wrote the piece--a faculty member colleague of mine at Bryant, Dr. Sukki Yoon, was a visiting scholar at a Madison Ave agency recently and this is what he reported to me:

Keith, I had a chance to converse with the creative director who's team came up with the pose. The discovery of this pose was quite by accident: while the creative team was discussing the Captain Morgan ad campaign, one of the creatives--simply on the spur of the moment--made a pose without a chair (or a stool), neither of which was available at the moment. Thus began the Captain Morgan "pose" and went on from that casual incident to became a central part of the ad and promotion strategy. Cool, isn't it?

So there you have it, some good ideas come out of nowhere, despite our sometime preference for more "solid" data...focus groups, in-depth interviews, marketing research!  Good managers get smart people in a room--or on the same team--and the sky's the limit as to what can be done sometimes!  

However, I still go back to the point of the earlier blog--the pose, per se, is fine, but how it got used...for "free," by unpaid actors, in public to support a worthy cause, now-banned-and-thus-naughty [which Diageo lucked out on], the celebrity-fan contests to see who do the pose longer-better-whatever--all of this was added genius to take a brand to new heights in terms of share of voice and non-paid media attention!  

Here we're talking not only with good luck, but smart marketing savvy  That we all might be so lucky in our marketing endeavors!  

As radio's legendary Paul Harvey used to sign-off by saying:  "And now you know the rest of the story!"

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