Che Guevara in Popular Culture - in Advertising

In Advertising

"There's something about that man in the photo, the Cuban revolutionary with the serious eyes, scruffy beard and dark beret. Ernesto "Che" Guevara is adored. He is loathed. Dead for nearly 40 years, he is everywhere - as much a cultural icon as James Dean or Marilyn Monroe, perhaps even more so among a new generation of admirers who've helped turn a devout Marxist into a capitalist commodity." — Martha Irvine, The Washington Post

• Ben and Jerry's has a brand of ice cream called: "Cherry Guevara", whose label states: "The revolutionary struggle of the cherries was squashed as they were trapped between two layers of chocolate. May their memory live on in your mouth." As you finish the ice cream you're left with a wooden stick with the words "We will bite to the end!"
• A French businessman has Che Perfume by Chevignon, "Dedicated to those who want to feel and smell like revolutionaries."
• Converse uses the image of Che Guevara in one of their shoe ad campaigns.
• In 2008, Romanian auto maker Dacia (a subsidiary of Renault) produced a new commercial advertising their new Logan MCV station wagon titled "revolution". The ad, utilizing actors, begins with Fidel Castro's arriving at a remote villa, where he finds a host of other modern era revolutionaries, and ends with his standing on the back patio, where Che Guevara tells Karl Marx that "it is time for another revolution". Marx responds, "Che, it's about what people need."
• In Peru and in Strängnäs station], one can purchase packs of El Che cigarettes (ultra lights).
• "El Ché-Cola" donates 50% of their net profits to NGOs, and has the slogan: "Change your habits to change the world."
• In 1970, the Italian company Olivetti utilized Che's image for an ad celebrating its creative sales force. It read, "We would have hired him".
• Smirnoff vodka attempted to use the image of Che Guevara in an advertising campaign in 2000, but was stopped in court by photographer Alberto Korda, who took the original iconic image.
• For an advertising campaign, Taco bell dressed up a chihuahua like Che Guevara and had him state: "Yo quiero Taco Bell!", Spanish for: "I want Taco Bell!" When asked about the allusion to Che, Taco Bell's advertising director, Chuck Bennett, stated: "We wanted a heroic leader to make it a massive taco revolution."

"Does Che survive only as a t-shirt icon? The big media and many Che biographers have stressed the kitchification of Che, the former with glee, the latter with regret. Has the once fearsome revolutionary been reduced to a harmless icon? The corporate world adept at co-optation would have us think so. Rather, I would say that the ‘real’ Che has not died, but undergone a tactical shift."

— David Kunzle, author of Che Guevara: Icon, Myth, and Message

• The New York based distributing company Raichle Molitor utilized a "Che look-alike contest" in order to create marketing buzz for their line of Fischer's Revolution skis. In defending their reasoning, product manager Jim Fleischer stated that "the Che image, just the icon and not the man's doings, represented what we wanted: revolution and extreme change."
• In an advertisement for Jean Paul Gaultier sunglasses circulated in Europe in 1999, Che is painted as a Frida Kahlo-type landscape, in front of a blazing desert sun.
• Leica (which was the camera used by Alberto Korda to capture Guerrillero Heroico) has used an image of their camera with Che's red star to advertise their "revolutionary camera."
• The offices of the Financial Times in London, features a large poster of a Che-esque Richard Branson greeting visitors in a beret, while pronouncing "We live in financial times".
• In November 2008, The Bobblehead LLC company released a limited edition of 100 Che Guevara bobbleheads. Creator and owner Rick Lynn announced that it had been a "long time dream" to create the hand painted and custom designed pieces, which will be hand signed and numbered as a collectors item.
• In December 2008, the Tartan Army began selling t-shirts with "Scotland's favorite son" Robert Burns in the mould of the iconic image of Che Guevara. The proceeds will go to organizations that assist disadvantaged and chronically ill children in countries the Tartan Army visit.