I was walking on Kalverstraat, the famous shopping area in Amsterdam, headed towards Intertoys. Just shortly before Intertoys is a Diesel store, which I am not interested in, so I don’t even look at its window display. However, this time my eye caught something, which my brain registered as odd after I passed the store. So I retraced my steps back to make sure I had seen correctly.
This is what I saw on their window: “Be stupid.”
Seriously… they can’t be serious???
But they are! This is their marketing campaign!
“Be stupid.”
“Stupid is trial and error. Mostly error.”
“Smart may have the answers, but stupid has all the interesting questions.”
“We’re with stupid.” Notice the headless mannequins? That’s what they expect their customers to be: headless and stupid.
“Be stupid.”
And I stood for a few more seconds to see if anyone would actually go into the store—a store that told them to be stupid and declared that they ‘were with stupid’. Sure enough, there were people going in… What’s wrong with people??? Is aspiring to be stupid the new in-thing?
And Diesel is not a cheap store—it’s a brand name that sells crappy old looking clothes.
How do they do it?
They are telling people that they are outright stupid and those people who shop at Diesel MUST be stupid. Why else anyone in their right mind would walk into a store that tells them to be stupid???
Beats me… 
Tags: advertising, Amsterdam, brainwashing, marketing, mixed messages, Netherlands