Another puzzling product

I had some friends visiting from Australia at the weekend. They rented a bach on Waiheke and were kind enough to invite us to join them.  On Saturday afternoon we came across this.

Now I would have thought that this was a product with a limited potential audience.  There are people who really like Holden utes. And there are people who really like jigsaws. But I would have thought that a Venn diagram illustrating the overlap between these two interests would show it to be very small indeed.

So I can think of only two plausible explanations.

Perhaps this is an early childhood brand indoctrination tool.  Kids love jigsaws, so what better way to introduce your child to the majesty of an overpowered, lime-green utility vehicle than through the medium of puzzle?  It’s really just a juvenile version of stubbie-holder.

The other possibility is that it’s part of an extraordinarily complex (not to mention, ambitious) marketing plan on behalf of Holden.  The bach we were staying in could best be described as ‘executive accommodation’. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb in imagining that the most common tenants are not Holden drivers. Mercedes, yes, BMW, very probably, Audi, almost certainly, but not Holden. So I’m wondering whether Holden have entered into some arrangement with providers of executive holiday accommodation to plant these utility-themed jigsaws as a covert way of getting Holden in front of an audience it would otherwise struggle to access?

I really hope this is the case and that at some point a guy comes home to his bemused wife driving an orange ‘ignition metallic’ Maloo R8 ute, having gone out in the morning driving a silver Mercedes E-class.  When asked why, he’ll be completely unable to explain how it happened.  But somewhere they’ll be a very smug looking Holden Brand Manager who knows it was all down a cunningly-placed jigsaw.