No one wants to eat singing heads on their pizza.

It was during a late night show that I saw something even more repulsing than watching the real estate millions infomercial for the millionth time.  It was a television commercial for a beloved hot sauce brand, Tabasco.

Tabasco has been long revered as a leading hot sauce marketing case study and success story.  Their brand was strong enough to carry them beyond revenues for their core business of hot sauce.  Tabasco jumped from the grocery aisle and restaurant tabletop to the mainstream and sold everything from neckties to silk boxers with their brand equity.

Brand equity, like any other asset, can appreciate or depreciate depending on how you invest it.  The newest pizza commercial serves as a reminder that well-intentioned marketers can take a century old (once flaming hot) brand and reduce it to a mild and smoldering simmer.

I can get the notion of selling Tabasco with the idea that people staying up late are likely fatso’s that are stuffing their mouths with pizza while watching Jimmy Fallon – one can overlook that overstretched stereotype.  I also can understand the premise that adding Tabasco can make your pizza sing.  But literally singing?  Old men singing in harmony?  It’s like some sort of gone-wrong pimple remover commercial.

I’m all for innovative marketing and innovative ways to stretch a brand in to new segments or uses.  I’m certainly all for creative marketing ideas and even for new ways to use that bottle of Tabasco in the pantry.  Whoever sold the executives at Tabasco on running this commercial should have put as much salesmanship in to the actual commercial as they did convincing the brand managers to run it.