If you’re a fan of The Office, then you’re undoubtedly familiar with the Dunder Mifflin paper company. Now, in what’s been deemed a “reverse product placement” marketing deal to fight the “race to the bottom in the paper business”, Quill.com will offer Dunder Mifflin paper under a licensing agreement with NBCUniversal.
Packages feature slogans familiar to fans including “Our motto is, Quabity First” and “Get Your Scrant on.” In exchange, fans can expect to pay a higher price according to the Wall Street Journal, which states that the Dunder Mifflin brand will be priced “largely above private-label copy paper.”
It should be interesting to see if consumers are willing to pay significantly higher prices (Dunder Mifflin paper is currently on sale for $34.99 a carton and is regularly priced at $47.99 per carton) for a fictional brand of copy paper when:
a) sales in the industry are already lagging due to the ever-growing use of technology (email, pdfs, etc)
b) most people typically buy the copy paper that’s the cheapest for general use (well, at least I do anyway)
c) the Dunder Mifflin branding will be on the packaging and not the paper itself
I guess we shall soon see!
