This is a high profile brand of condoms, which are used when doing protected sex. This brand is meant to serve different democratic groups for different functions. The marketers of this brand first target the young who normally practice sex for pleasure. This is the 18 -24 demographic. The rationale behind this is to protect them against sexually transmitted diseases including HIV/AIDS. When the target group is the old (say 35 years and above demographic), the reason is to control population through procreation as well as for health purposes.
The young people are supposed to practice certain demographic values like social tranquility. They are supposed to conform to moral principles that govern their behaviour in society. But the marketing of the brand to the young people has brought about sexual freedom thus violating the cultural practices they are supposed to observe like “no sex before marriage”. The other values that this demographic (18-24 years) are to observe include religious practices. This is a very important demographic value for a population at this age bracket.
This means that any products being advertised in the market and which are prohibited among the youth, companies must desist from using certain cultural memes that may attract this group. The marketers of this products usually use very attractive and easy – to – understand memes that can easily woo the young into using trust condom. They very well know that it is the group in dire need of these sexual protective devices. Cultures such as homosexuality are deemed not to be right. The practice is morally unacceptable but the continual usage of cultural memes would tend to advocate for such unacceptable cultural practices.
In their marketing of the condoms, the trust company has applied a lot of cultural memes in ensuring that their message is conveyed. Some of these are pictures of people on billboards, in sexual moods and holding a packet of trust condom while smiling. The messages are very simple – that you’ll have something to smile about after using the device. And for those fearing both sex and condom usage especially the 17 -24 demographic would build an attitude of confidence on the usage of the product.
At the bottom of the boards are messages like “Mr.X has his, do you have yours? Any person including the 35 -50 demographic would interpret to mean that using the brand is just something normal. Once the company has developed a certain meme, it does a lot of market research to test its fame/ suitability before publicizing it. The objective here is to come up with a meme, written in simple English, can attract attention and interest quickly. Other cultural memes in their marketing of the trust condoms rotate around health and safety in their usage as well as ease of use/ comfortability.
On their packaging is a picture portraying how user- friendly they are. Infact even the picture itself gives such a conclusion in one’s mind. Other messages such as “studded with extra protection” meant to attract attention and create interest on the users have also been printed. Here, the complex and health and safety guidelines on how they should be used can easily be ignored by the users. Dangers on usage and erosion of the demographic values as a result of its usage are easily ignored. Anybody looking at such a meme would conclude ‘oh, I need it”
The values discussed above are quite important for the respective demographics. It is important for the 17 – 24 demographics to abstain from sexual behaviours. At their age, these are people who should be building their future careers, through education. Also at this age bracket, one might not be able to decide on what is good or bad to do, moral and immoral etc. The cultural memes of the trust company in marketing their trust condoms therefore interferes with the adherence of such demographic values.
On the other hand, procreation is a very important value amongst many people’s cultures. Even biblically, it was God’s wish that people must multiply. The cultural memes therefore tend to interweave with this value especially within the 35 -50 demographic. In conclusion, companies usually employ cultural memes when they know that fair marketing strategies based on the truth may not successfully sail through. And that is why Trust company employs such techniques to market their “trust condom brand”