Though actual sales of Nissan cars dropped 3.2 percent in 1996, the campaign continues to coast, proving our previous observation that the solution to people hating car ads is to not even try to sell cars. As the toy-soldier battle over the right to make gewgaws based on the Star Wars prequel trilogy suggests, the money's in more portable vessels of consumer identity, anyways. Current sales of mid-series Star Wars thingees make up 10 percent of Hasbro's entire revenue, and almost half of Galoob's, but the toy industry is littered with the mangled plastic bodies of action figures that just didn't move. People the Nissan ads with miniature Ewan Macgregors, slap an oval on the pre-Millennium Falcon, and feel the force of brand extension at a theater near you. Strikes are ugly.
Businesses get disrupted, employees who had worked together become adversaries, and people get hurt.
So went a sermon from the editorial page of the Washington Business Journal this past Tuesday.