Think Customers: The 1to1 Blog

In the time since the last official GN'R release, 1993's The Spaghetti Incident?, empires have risen and fallen. Most of the people I knew at the band's label, Geffen, have left the company (and the music industry ain't so healthy itself). The U.S. has gotten involved in a couple of wars. Thomas Pynchon has published two novels. Democracy has come to a number of countries though not, as countless observers have noted, to China.

I should point out that I'm not exactly a GN'R fan. As someone who came of age during the first punk/new wave era, I found their music to be a bit old hat, with a handful of memorable hooks overruled by Axl Rose's swaying like Davy Jones during performances. The so-called "outrageous behavior" had been done before, and better, by everyone from the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols to Motley Crue and, in a way, Milli Vanilli.

(And I'm only parenthetically noting that GN'R as a band hasn't existed for years; what you have now is Axl fronting a bunch of faceless guys, which would be like Thom Yorke calling a Jonny Greenwood-less outfit "Radiohead" or someone touring as "The Who" without Keith Moon and John Entwistle. Whoops, on second thought...)

Still, Nov. 23 is looming large, and some sharp-eyed observers with a sweet tooth were loudly wondering how Dr Pepper was going to live up to its promise: to deliver a can of Dr Pepper to 305 million-plus Americans. And the short answer is: They're not.

Instead, consumers will have to visit the sodamaker's website to register for a coupon to obtain their free can. Registration will be open only for 24 hours after the album's release date, and vouchers could take up to six weeks to arrive. So right off the bat you're cutting out the approximately 85 million folks who don't have Internet access. Add in the facts that Nov. 23 is a Sunday, and that most people presumably don't regularly visit the Dr Pepper site on those days -- not to mention that the GN'R promotion is mentioned nowhere on the site's homepage -- and you've got a brand that's failing to deliver on its (admittedly somewhat goofy) promise.

In a time when the nation's riven by economic meltdowns, a yo-yoing stock market, and an increasingly nasty Presidential election, is it too much to ask for us all to be able to enjoy a Dr Pepper at the end of next month, or December, or whenever that coupon finally arrives?

Maybe so. If the marketers over at Pibb Xtra have any sense, they'll start working on a "Free drink with the publication of a new J.D. Salinger novel" immediately.