Steal These Ideas!: Marketing Secrets That Will Make You a Star, 2nd Edition

The Deceased

Deceased people work as spokespeople, too, but only if the fit is unique, realistic, and done in good taste. And long-gone dead people are way better than the recently departed—think George Washington, not George Plimpton. In general, though, this is a tricky category and 95 percent of the time not the right approach to take. That said, there have been a few campaigns over the past 30 years in which the use of the deceased has really made a big impact. The most effective was probably the long-running IBM campaign in the 1980s for its line of PCs with a Charlie Chaplin character as spokesperson. Chaplin played an everyman character in his silent films, the Little Tramp, and generated huge appeal as a simple person caught up in a complex ...