Companies See Gulf Crisis as Marketing Opportunity : Business: Firms attempt to link their products with troops in the desert, either by advertising or giveaways.

Now, from those wonderful folks who brought you the American Buy-centennial and the official snack food of the Olympic Games, comes . . .

The Persian Gulf Crisis.

With national advertising campaigns and well-promoted giveaway programs for the troops, U.S. companies that market everything from cosmetics to cold drinks to long-distance telephone calls have attempted to draw links between their products and the country’s fighting men and women in Saudi Arabian desert.

“War itself is not attractive, but there are aspects that are,” said David Stewart, a USC marketing professor who specializes in consumer psychology. “There are heroes. . . . There is goodness and nobility. It’s like a super sporting event.”

While the appeals of such marketing campaigns are obvious, there are also traps. Marketing experts have kept a close watch on public opinion polls, which generally have shown a gradual weakening of what was once overwhelming support for Operation Desert Shield. There are lines of taste and commercialism that must not be crossed.

“Retribution from consumers is swift and fierce if you go over the edge,” said Owen Dougherty, vice president for communication for the Foote, Cone & Belding advertising agency in Chicago.

Throughout the troop buildup, however, oil companies, media groups, department stores, a labor union, a pro-nuclear energy group, a beverage container manufacturer and others all have have invoked the crisis in advertising campaigns.

Last month, in one of the more arresting pitches, Macy’s department stores and Cosmair cosmetics company took out a full-page advertisement in the New York Times in an attempt to persuade consumers to buy bottles of “action-oriented” Drakkar Noir after-shave, shampoo or deodorant as Christmas presents for soldiers in Saudi Arabia.

“Make it a merrier Christmas for family and friends overseas,” read the advertisement, which featured a photograph of a camouflaged infantryman.

“It’s one of the ways we can participate,” said Suzie Davidowitz, a Cosmair spokesperson. “A lot of people are doing things to help. We just happen to sell fragrances.”

Such ads are in the great wartime tradition of entrepreneurial America. During the Civil War, some people made fortunes hawking war bonds, steel-clad protective Bibles and even guaranteed lifelike embalming to anxious recruits. In World War II, products such as Coca-Cola and Lucky Strike cigarettes skyrocketed to international prominence through their exposure to GIs around the globe. In the Korean War, often dubbed the “forgotten war,” and the unpopular Vietnam War, however, advertisers shied away from combat-related marketing strategies.

With the Persian Gulf, however, some companies have sensed a foundation of public support that can translate into successful promotional campaigns.

“It’s not unlike Nike sponsoring a marathon,” said Debbie MacInnis, a marketing professor at the University of Arizona. “It’s just smart business. As a consumer, it is a little disconcerting to see business capitalizing on a national crisis, but as a marketer, it’s a very interesting idea.”

MacInnis said the gulf crisis, for the moment, has many of same qualities as other special events that attract advertisers: the excitement of the Super Bowl, the patriotic fervor of the Olympics, the Rockwellian glow of a Main Street parade.

“It’s patriotism and Americana,” she said.

The daily prominence of the crisis in the news media makes it even more attractive.

“It’s front and center stage in the public’s mind now,” said Howard Bell, president of the American Advertising Federation, a trade group

So far, most of the gulf-related advertising has been restricted to print media. Advertising experts said the situation in the Persian Gulf is too volatile to justify investing the longer lead times and higher production costs of national television advertisements.

No product has been too esoteric to ballyhoo. Just five weeks after the invasion of Kuwait, Tetra Pak, a Shelton, Conn., company that packages beverages in aseptic containers, declared in a barrage of large advertisements in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today:

“Technology has made it so our GIs can have American milk in the Saudi desert. . . . We are proud of our armed forces. And we are proud that our beverage packaging makes it possible for them to get the nutrition they need so far from home.”

Not content with demonstrating the drink box’s role in maintaining military readiness, the company launched two more campaigns showing the container’s contribution in saving refugees in Jordan and conserving worldwide fuel supplies because of its shipping efficiency.

Tetra Pak spokeswoman Virginia Harger said: “You can just see the applications and say, ‘Wow!’ ”

Some advertisements have attempted to bolster public images. For instance, hotel queen Leona M. Helmsley, convicted recently on tax evasion and mail fraud charges, took out a full-page advertisement in September to lambaste Iraqi President Saddam Hussein and throw her support behind the hostages.

Some companies have gone beyond gulf-related advertising and employed a more direct method to gain high-profile exposure for their products: They have gone to the desert and given them away.

Companies have flooded Saudi Arabia with free products, largely to aid the military effort, but also to curry favor with a group of consumers that marketing professionals see as the most lucrative in the world: American youth.

The list of donations includes 1,000 flying disks and boomerangs, 2,500 hand-held video games, 3,250 portions of dehydrated ice cream, 10 tons of official National Football League souvenirs, 100,000 boxes of official Major League Baseball cookies, 2,000 cases of nonalcoholic beer, 20,000 puzzle books, 1,000 yellow-striped, high-visibility footballs and a still-to-be-determined number of Wiffle Balls.

“The key here is that people who fight in wars tend to be young,” said USC’s Stewart. “They’re forming preferences now that will stay with them for the rest of their lives.”

It’s a process he calls “consumer socialization.”

“Cigarette and beverage companies sponsor a lot of car racing and professional sporting events because that’s where young people congregate,” he said. “It’s trying to tie a product with an experience. War is just a much more intense experience.”

Stewart said Gillette gave away safety razors to soldiers during World War II. When the war was over, the soldiers continued using the razor, leading to the disappearance of the straight razor.

“Spam is a classic example,” he said. Troops who ate the processed meat during World War II continued eating it at home, turning it into a common household food.

(A digest-sized version of The Los Angeles Times is being made available for free distribution to the troops.)

Some experts said the risks are too great to justify gulf-related promotions. To begin with, they said, an overabundance of such ads could provoke a consumer backlash. In addition, any advertising campaign runs the risk of appearing to be grandstanding or exploitation of a national crisis.

Said John Yost, general manager of the San Francisco-based advertising firm Hal Riney & Partners: “Most people wouldn’t want to touch this with a 10-foot pole. In fact, to use the crisis is in pretty bad taste. You don’t want to mess with something as serious as international politics where lives are at stake.”

Also, experts said, the eagerness to tap into the gulf crisis could fade fast if the face-off turns bloody, transforming the patriotic image of troops in the desert into a vision of destruction.

Russ Winer, professor of marketing at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, said he believes that companies already have begun to shy away from the crisis as public opinion has grown more mixed in the past few weeks.

“It’s a lot riskier now,” he said. “In the beginning it was all parades and flag waving. Now it’s getting more serious. If the shooting starts and you start seeing body bags, a lot of this will stop.”

The Suntory Water Group considered exactly that point when it decided not to advertise its contribution.

“It was discussed very early on,” Somerstein said. “You could spend $100,000 on an advertising campaign and tomorrow, the situation could change.”

Somerstein cited the Vietnam War--a conflict that was rarely present in advertising. “A company could make a donation and then public support could turn,” he said.

He said a product that became too closely allied with a conflict could just as easily become tainted by controversy this time around. “When it comes down to it, people won’t separate the two,” he said.

The logistic challenges of organizing giveaway promotions can be formidable. In August, the Coca-Cola Co. managed not only to distribute nearly 500,000 cans of soda, but delivered them cold and to distant outposts.

Refrigerated trucks were sent out crammed with red and white, bilingual Arabic-English cans of Coke Classic. Deep in the desert, camouflaged Army all-terrain vehicles would rumble up, load a couple of chilled cases and disappear over the sandy horizon. For many soldiers, it was the first cold beverage they had had in weeks.

“They had the same look in their eyes that my family gets whenever I go home,” one American worker who helped distribute the drink said.

Coca-Cola got a promotional return for the effort, as the program received news media coverage.

Randy Donaldson, a Coca-Cola spokesman said there was a better payoff than laudatory press: “To take a person there and help them, well, you’ve got a lifelong friend. That’s clearly a benefit for any company.”

Other companies have suffered setbacks as they have discovered that Saudi Arabia is not the ideal location to show off a product. Candy bars have melted in the 100-plus-degree heat. Beer companies have been stymied because the Saudis ban alcoholic beverages. American Telephone & Telegraph Co. had to cancel a program offering all military personnel free phone calls to the United States.

The program, intended in part to demonstrate a new long-distance service it had recently started in Saudi Arabia, proved too popular. Soldiers flocked to every available phone. Lines of desert-camouflaged troops gathered at phone booths around the country. At a pace of 1,500 GI calls an hour, the long-distance system was soon swamped. AT&T; was besieged with infuriated Saudia Arabian business people, angry that they couldn’t dial out of the kingdom.