>>>The victim is the competition, because this kind of high-stakes advertising is pushing small players off the field. What are the chances of one, say, Zachary to counter this?
>>>And the victim, of course, is the consumer. Whatever the confectioners paid for this is surely not coming out of their personal pockets, it's all in the price of the next one you buy. Even if you buy from competition, because they are forced into responding, which will cost them you.
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>Actually it was Google who sought permission to use the trademark. Wouldn't be surprised if no $ changed hands at all.

It can conceivably be a freebie this time. It's a new advertising venue. Next edition, specially if this proves to be profitable, mmmm...

>I'd also say that the idea that the candy market will move to kit-kat because it's on a phone, is disparaging to the market. Certainly it's true that product placement in a supermarket affects sales because people make a decision to purchase and then review the visible options. I suppose they might look at their phone and decide to buy candy- but maybe they won't buy kit-kat when they hit the store.

Ads like this serve to push out other brands out of people's heads. You keep seeing this one, you remember a few others, and of course you can't remember those you forgot, so you don't really notice them on the shelf - or the retail just stops putting them on the shelves because they think those won't sell as well as those advertised. So advertising becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, simply because the whole business (from production to retail) believes it works.

> Maybe Willy Wonka's candy just looks so scrumptious that they grab one of those. Advertizing text books always have examples where advertizing benefits the whole market segment rather than just the originator, especially if there's too much space between the advertisement and the till.

True. I'm receiving regular junk mail from a local furniture seller, but nothing in their leaflet looks too compelling to drive across town and get disappointed with the chinese junk that passes for furniture nowadays. But it was a nice reminder to my wife to tell me that they got new office chairs in the other one in the neighborhood... so I went there and bought the one I'm sitting on at the moment.