世界商业报道[biz.icxo.com]消息：美国7-11连锁便利店有意更换形象，把店面装饰如著名老牌动画片《辛普森一家》中出现过的便利店Ｋｗｉｋ－Ｅ－Ｍａｒｔｓ的模样。不仅店铺外观像动画片中的便利店，顾客们在店里还可以找到很多关于“辛普森一家”的主题商品：吃了会拉肚子的KrustyO’s谷物早餐，号称“双份糖浆，双份咖啡因，双重感受”的动感可乐，还有就是“死或病”冰沙（当然，杯子外面印的是“死或病”，里面装的是７－１１的经典饮品“思乐冰”冰沙）。
Over the weekend, 7-Eleven Inc. turned a dozen stores into Kwik-E-Marts, the fictional convenience stores of “The Simpsons” fame, in the latest example of marketers making life imitate art.
Those stores and most of the 6,000-plus other 7-Elevens in North America will sell items that until now existed only on television: Buzz Cola, KrustyO’s cereal and Squishees, the slushy drink knockoff of Slurpees.
It’s all part of a campaign to hype the July 27 opening of “The Simpsons Movie,” the big-screen debut for the long-running television cartoon, which loves to lampoon 7-Eleven as a store that sells all kinds of unhealthy snacks and is run by a man with a thick Indian accent.
For 20th Century Fox Film Corp. and Homer’s creators at Gracie Films, the stunt is a cheap way to call attention to their movie, since 7-Eleven is bearing all the costs, which executives of the retail chain put at somewhere in the single millions.
At 7-Eleven, they’re hoping it shows the ubiquitous chain has a trait seen in few corporations — the ability to laugh at themselves.
“We thought if you really want to do something different, the idea of actually changing stores into Kwik-E-Marts was over the top but a natural,” said Bobbi Merkel, an executive for of 7-Eleven’s advertising agency, FreshWorks, a unit of Omnicom Group Inc. “It shows they get the joke.”
The monthlong promotion has been rumored a long time — it’s hard to keep a secret known by so many suppliers and franchisees — but 7-Eleven managed to keep the locations of the stores quiet until early Sunday morning. That’s when the exteriors of 11 U.S. stores and one in Canada were flocked in industrial foam and given new signs to replicate the animated look of Kwik-E-Marts.
