“Stopping in Montana recently to tout his Social Security reform proposal, President Bush opened the floor to questions. One question: ‘What kind of mountain bike do you ride?’ Mr. Bush hesitated. ‘I’m not supposed to endorse products, but it’s called a Trek,’ he said, launching into a minilecture on the value of regular exercise,” Christopher Cooper writes for The Wall Street Journal. “With those words, Trek Bicycle Corp., a closely held company based in Waterloo, Wis., received one of the luckiest breaks in the marketing business: a presidential product mention in a favorable context.”

Cooper writes, “Trek joins a select group of companies that have had the good fortune to be favored by an American president and his family. Ryan Atkinson, a Trek spokesman, says the company is ‘psyched’ about the association but notes it would be “bad form” to directly tout its Bush connection. Instead, he says, in its factory tours, Trek makes an indirect reference to its favorable standing in the White House by emphasizing that Secret Service agents routinely use Trek products while shadowing Mr. Bush. (Though it was the first time Mr. Bush has publicly mentioned the product, he has been photographed on a Trek bike before.)”

“There’s no law in the U.S. against presidential endorsements, but tradition and taste dictate that the president refrain from product plugs. ‘A paid endorsement is not something he’d ever do,’ White House spokeswoman Dana Perino says of President Bush. For a marketer, getting a presidential mention — or, better yet, having the president photographed using your product — is mostly a matter of being in the right place at the right time,” Cooper writes. “In the current charged political atmosphere, a presidential endorsement may not always be a godsend. When Mr. Bush was photographed recently using Apple Computer Inc.’s iPod music player, the Web site Macdailynews abandoned its relatively genteel discussions of electronic gadgets and turned darkly partisan. ‘That does it, I’m tossing my iPod in the Potomac,’ one poster said.”

Full article here.

MacDailyNews Take: ‘Twas the now-famous MDN reader “me” who posted the line on Dec 22, 2004 at 10:15am that’s now forever immortalized in The Wall Street Journal. We now resume our “relatively genteel discussions.”

Related MacDailyNews articles:
U.S. President George Bush a confirmed Apple iPod user (images included) – December 22, 2004