With a sarcastic intro the blogger explains that marketers have an expectation that consumers use their products as designed and when this doesn't happen decisions must be made "and decisions are toughies."
He goes on to sight several different example of how a brands products were used in ways perhaps not intended for and how the companies behind said brands reacted. For example when a man furnishes his house with FedEx box furniture and posts the pictures to his website he gets sued by FedEx as they complain that he shouldn't be using the brand for his personal benefit.
When a MIT student builds a Gatorade-bottle raft and crosses the Charles river Gatorade responds by giving him and his roommate two $2 coupons and two lanyards.
It would appear that Coke didn't quite get the Mentos-diet Coke popularity when they respond to various experimenters by saying "the 'craziness with Mentos ... doesn't fit with the brand personality' of Diet Coke." Mentos on the other hand was "Tickled pink" (their words) by the whole act and sent sent some experimenters 3000 Mentos and created a website to host videos of the wildness that ensued.
The blogger concludes by praising Mentos for really understanding what it was all about and realizing that instead of doing any harm they were actually enforcing the brand recognition.
While I can't really compare my potential project to this directly it still serves to enforce the power of both the people and the tools they use, in this case the web.
source: http://brandednewb.blogspot.com/2006/07/please-use-as-directed-pretty-please.html
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