Alternative marketing thinking

Keep up with Jones’

If there’s a category in the US that’s all but full up, it must be the share of throat business. The one dominated by the likes of Pepsi, Coke, Gatorade, even Starbucks and Aquafina. But if you are Peter Van Stolk, you have some other ideas. Jones Soda is the anti thesis of a brand. Eschewing the traditional in every way, it does little or no advertising. The distribution is all wonky (their specially created flavour for Valentines sold out weeks before the big day), it’s not available in supermarkets, but in skateboard stores, tattoo parlors and body piercing outlets. It lets customers create their own packaging at myjones.com. At last count there were over 400,000 different labels, featuring dogs, teddy bears and more on the site. Jones is one of the few anti-brands out there, preferring to let word of mouth do almost all of their marketing. They even have a MySpace page, set up way before the world realized how cool MySpace would become.