| Marketing the Feline Mystique
Advertisers count on cats' surging popularity to
sell cars, colas, and more.
by Margaret Shakespeare
The camera pans slowly through a softly lit living room. From atop a
grand piano, a gray-striped tabby cat mews in response to a car horn, then
pads down the keyboard, setting off a soundtrack of Chopin. He runs to a
windowsill to greet the family -- who arrive in a Volvo.
A plain old cat selling fancy cars?
"A cat is a nice sophisticated animal and this is a quiet, sophisticated
commercial," said Earl Cavanah, executive vice president and associate
creative director at Scali McCabe Sloves, Volvo's agency.
Move over, Morris.
That persnickety cat may be the most famous cat in America, thanks to a
long-running ad campaign that has made 9-Lives cat food a household name.
Although Morris was hardly the only cat peddling products, the others were
relegated to "soft goods" like bedding, lingerie, and cosmetics, the sorts
of items that advertisers thought could use a cat's soft touch. Cats have
never been as popular as dogs in advertising, but that's changing.
By the latest whisker count, cats, for the first time, now outnumber dogs
in American households. According to the Pet Food Institute, there were 56
million cats in American homes last year, and 52 million dogs. And they're
doing more than just snoozing on the couch: They're advertising everything
from high-priced cars and business machines to communications systems,
health insurance, diet soda, and sleeping aids. Among the companies that
have turned to cats to pitch their goods are the Marine Midland Bank,
Swissair, Empire Blue Cross/Blue Shield, Diet Coke, and even its archrival,
Diet Pepsi.
"Studies show that the average American is bombarded with anywhere from
400 to 3,000 ads a day, so advertisers have to get your attention somehow,"
said Jacob Jacoby, the Merchants Council Professor of Consumer Behavior at
New York University's business school. "If cats are in 56 million house-
holds, then you're trying to sell information to those 56 million households
automatically." Dr. Shelly Chaiken, an associate professor at New York
University in social psychology, added: "Old people and young people have
cats, and you can slice across the market. It's not necessarily a rational
appeal."
There may also be something more subtle at work, said Ethel Tobach,
adjunct professor of psychology at Hunter College and curator of the American
Museum of Natural History's department of mammalogy. "There are the old
stereotypes that equate a man with a dog and a woman with a cat," she said.
"Advertisers in general are trying to make more appeals to women."
Whatever the motivation, advertisers seem to believe that cats can sell.
At Canon U.S.A., the big camera and office equipment company, executives
even went so far as to name a new product the Cat. The company calls the
Canon Cat a "work processor" -- a combination typewriter and word processor
-- and advertises it with the help of an aristocratic-looking cat named
Drake.
A cat "has sort of a mystique about it," said Paul Denimark, who handles
Cat marketing at Canon U.S.A. When Canon's advertising agency, Grey Adver-
tising, proposed the name, Canon agreed. An additional motivation, he said,
was the fact that the machine is so unusual that most people, at first, do
not know what it will do -- just as they do not know what a real cat will do.
Like most advertising decisions, it was not made lightly -- and it drew its
share of in-house criticism. "I fought the campaign tooth and claw because
I am deathly afraid of cats," said Joan Rainaldi, a national training
manager at Canon. She has since come around, however. "I have to admit
that it couldn't have worked better," she said.
The print campaign started in September with full-body shots of Drake and
a single line of copy on one page: "The Canon Cat is Coming..." Then the
reader can open or turn the page to see Drake leaping, a graphic way to
illustrate the Cat's pink "leap" keys, which enable the machine's user to
move through the text. In a reader survey done by Readex, Inc., the ad
scored highest -- 83 percent -- in the "remembered seeing" category when it
appeared in the October issue of The Office magazine.
While Drake is clearly hustling his product, other ad cats are taking a
more low-key approach. In a series of commercials that began last year for
Sominex sleeping pills, a calico cat named Bridget ends up asleep on her
owner's bed.
"The animal could have become the star of the commercial or the message
could have been conveyed without the cat; we are, after all, selling a sleep
product, not a cat," said Neal Heller, product manager of Sominex, which is
owned by Beecham Products Inc. "But here it adds value."
Steve Baer, a former senior writer at Ogilvy & Mather, which produced the
commercial, recalled, "Originally we had just two people going to bed, but
we put the cat in as a thread or as puncutation points." In the ad, Bridget
walks into a room at bedtime, is put out for the night but comes back and is
allowed to curl up on the bed.
When New York Telephone decided to do a series of radio and television
ads to highlight the importance of telephone lines to everyday life, it
decided a cat could help tell the story. In one ad, a cat is perched on his
master's shoulder, peering intently at a computer screen. In a radio ad,
a neighbor calls to ask an elderly woman if she needs anything from the
store; it turns out that Whiskers -- and her new litter -- need milk.
"We were looking at how to enhance situations," said Robert McDuffey, an
art director at Young & Rubicam, who did one of the ads.
The allure of the cat is hardly restricted to Madison Avenue. In Japan,
the Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation sent a crew to New York about
two years ago to make television spots of a cat roaming the city, observing
urban activity. The idea, according to Merrill Aldighieri, an art director
at Co-Directions in New York, who cast the cat, was that people would ident-
ify with this lone cat, miss a loved one, and call home.
For a series of ads that ran in Japan, she auditioned dozens of cats,
casting a silver tabby by the name of Tyrone Fletcher. In the ads, Tyrone
observed pigeons from a Manhattan rooftop, visited restaurants, sniffed
around on a kitchen counter, and ran down ladders and across brick walls.
With music by the Japanese composer Go Ohgami, the commercials had the
quality of a music video. The company followed with another series, also
featuring a cat.
Tyrone seemed a likely choice for the assignment. One of the best-known
ad cats in the business, he has made more than 40 commercials, appeared on
the "Today" show and "The David Letterman Show," according to his trainer,
Linda Hanrahan, owner of Animals for Advertising, an animal theatrical
agency in New York.
For its efforts -- a week or more of print and video shooting on the
Canon job, for example -- a cat earns "enough to pay for his cat food and
vet bills," said Ms. Hanrahan, who like most of her colleagues would not
give exact figures. Fees start at several hundred dollars and go up accord-
ing to the number of tricks required and their difficulty, plus the length
of the job. Trainers generally bring along a back-up cat -- sometimes more
than one -- in case the star gets tired or refuses to cooperate. Even so,
cat ads have been known to increase the time it takes to shoot an ad -- and
the cost.
[the New York Times, Sunday, May 29, 1988]
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| IS IT POSSIBLE? A SENSITIVE MORRIS?
For most of his 19-year television life, Morris the Cat has relished
his role as a fussy feline, disdainful of inferior food and indifferent
to his owners. A rugged cat, in a fluffy sort of way, Morris has been
the Clark Gable of the catnip crowd. It was Morris's machismo that sup-
posedly prompted Leo Burnett U.S.A. in 1969 to choose him over other
cats to represent 9-Lives Cat Food, a division of Star-Kist Foods Inc.
The selection of Morris began a marketing legend.
But times -- and Morris -- are changing. "It used to be that the
relationship between owner and cat was not real warm," said Bill Johnson,
group vice president of the pet food division of Star-Kist, a subsidiary
of the H.J. Heinz Company. "But as the single life-style and dual-
households developed, the pet has developed into a surrogate for a child
or other family members. There is now a cozier, warmer, more comfortable
relationship" between cats and owners.
So in future commercials, Star-Kist is considering changing Morris'
image. He will be less self-centered and grumpy, more sensitive and open.
Unlike his previous 80 commercials, Morris may be seen, lovingly, with
his owner.
The idea, of course, is to create better feelings about Morris so cat
owners will buy 9-Lives pet food. Over the years Star-Kist, which owns
Morris, has spent about $1 million on Morris advertising and promotions.
Mr. Johnson acknowleged that Morris's effect on pet food sales is
difficult to track, but he said that sales have steadily increased since
Morris made his debut in 1969. 9-Lives leads the canned cat food industry,
with an estimated $264 million in sales in 1987, 23 percent of the market.
If Morris has been good for 9-Lives, 9-Lives was a life-saver --
literally -- for Morris. Actually, there have been two Morrises. The
first was 20 minutes from death in an East Coast animal shelter in 1966
when he was saved by an animal trainer and talent scout, Bob Martwick, who
became Morris's personal trainer.
That cat died in 1977 at the age of 17. But Morris's product identi-
fication with 9-Lives was so strong that Star-Kist decided to find a
second Morris. In 1980 Morris II assumed the mantle of America's leading
spokescat. Star-Kist says that no one accused the company of being dis-
respectful to the original Morris by replacing him with a duplicate.
Despite the current Morris's runaround schedule -- in the last two years
he has traveled more than 100,000 miles and made 50 personal appearances --
the company insists that there is still only one Morris, not several
orange cats bounding around the country like so many Elvis impersonators.
Some animal cartoon characters, like Garfield the Cat and Opus the
Penguin, have made a great deal of money for their owners through licensing,
but Star-Kist has not used Morris in that fashion.
"We're concerned about abdicating his standing as a 9-Lives spokesman,
but we may have made a mistake in that regard," Mr. Johnson said. Ponder-
ing the 19-inch, 14-pound orange cat, he concluded, "There may be a lot
of untapped equity in that asset."
-- James Hirsch
NY Times, 29-May-1988
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