A restaurant in Latvia’s capital Riga has certainly found its marketing niche.

Decorated like a hospital, Hospitalis serves food, shaped like body parts, on operating-room dishes. Syringes contain liquids to go with the meals.

And just to take their image one step further, customers are treated liked patients by waitresses in nursing uniforms. From time to time deranged patients are wheeled through the restaurant in strait-jackets.

Personally, I’ve never liked dining on gore and nurses never help me feel relaxed, but I guess the owners of this places (real doctors, apparently) are confident the dining experience will live up to the publicity generated by the medical theme.

Photos here.

Don’t advertise, give people things! That seems to be the take-out of this U.S survey that found that promotional give-aways beat out all forms of TV, radio and print advertising as the most cost-effective advertising medium.

Give-aways had “a very low cost-per-impression, high recall among those who receive ad specialty items, and increased intent among recipients to make purchases from the advertiser,” the survey’s researchers said.

Key findings:

* 84% of people remember the advertiser on a product they receive.
* 42% have a more favourable impression of an advertiser after receiving an advertising specialty.
* Nearly one quarter indicate they are more likely to do business with an advertiser on items they receive.
* Writing instruments are the most commonly-owned advertising specialty, with 54% of respondents owning them, followed by shirts, caps and bags.
* The majority (81%) of promotional products were kept because they were considered useful.

More information on the survey is here (which, by the way, was undertaken by people who do promotional give-aways for a living, but interesting results none-the-less!)

With some mildly, soft-core bedroom scenes, including one with her gay male friend from New Zealand, the thinly disguised auto-biographical (reportedly), online novel by Moscow expat, American lawyer Deirdre Dare, and her see-through lingerie photos, have taken Ms Dare to centre stage in the world’s mainstream media. Personal branding sent viral to the max.

Here’s her website. Good luck, Ms Dare.

The government’s ‘tough guys’ image seen in John Key’s handshaking with a broken hand of 120 rugby league players (see yesterday’s post) has been boosted by social development minister Paula Bennett’s successful intervention recently in a teenaged girls’ street brawl.

Whether this impromptu ‘street-wise’ branding will serve them well going forward remains to be seen.  But it’s certainly a positive look in what it says about the minister as a person and perhaps a signpost towards the government’s intentions towards its proposed ‘boot camp’ youth policies.

New prime minister John Key has been somewhat missing-in-action since coming to office in November but it has been interesting to watch the media ruckus over his broken right arm and the repeating of the fact that Mr Key shook hands with 120 rugby league players soon after breaking his arm and before getting medical treatment.  A nice bit of mythology in the making.