The BBC reported a Missouri, USA car dealership offered a promotion where if one buys a car or truck, they can get either $250 in petrol vouchers or a free handgun. UK laws forbidding gun ownership aside for the moment, if they were to change, could this be a marketing opportunity for businesses in the UK?

Mark Muller, owner of Max Motors in Butler, Missouri, said sales quadrupled since the start of the offer. Every buyer “except one guy from Canada [wimp, Ed.] and one old guy” chose the gun, rather than the gas cards. Mr. Keller personally recommends the Keltec .380, “a nice little handgun that fits in your pocket.” When asked why, by the incredulous BBC reporter, his reply was: “We’re just damn glad to live in a free country where you can have a gun if you want to.” [And I’m damned glad not to anymore. Ed.]

Mr. Keller sells new and used General Motors/Ford cars and trucks. He added the promotion was inspired by comments from Barack Obama. “He said all those people in the Midwest are bitter, you’ve got to have compassion for them because they’re clinging to their guns and their Bibles. I found that quite offensive. We all go to church on Sunday and we all carry guns.”

Okay… how come we don’t feel safer? But I’m open minded and willing to try anything once. Since gun use is on the rise in the UK and sensing a “business opportunity” for UK residents to similarly protect their “bitter” selves, I began to look for UK businesses that might benefit from the PR and business boost of a similar promotion [once the law changes and with tongue firmly embedded in cheek!].

Try as I might, I could not avoid our Big Four… Tesco Supermarkets, British Telecom or BT, BSkyB and UK’s Labour Party. They all seem to suffer from por branding and bad publicity of late so this scheme just might do the trick.

Gordon Brown has had a bad run of luck. BBC Radio 5 this morning portrayed him as one who will never be a slave to fashion, opinion polls or a media flash in the pan of all sizzle and no steak. Mr. Brown is a serious, somber and dour Scotsman who is also headed to defeat by the smarmy upstart, hip young David Cameron in 2010. If he waits until 10-weeks before the election then announces this scheme, he would surely win the general election. Fire the pollsters and consultants and run security adverts that say, “Vote Labour and instead of a chicken in every pot, we’ll give you your very own handgun and blank rounds (live ones may only be fired over their heads as a warning shot) to scare off those pesky YOBS yourself!

BSkyB and BT both want to own our entire home communications platform. They both sell Broadband services, telephony, movies and other programmes for both home and on the go viewing. Both charge a king’s ransom for their services because they can and at the end of the day really don’t care what you or I think of them.

Offering a Keltec .380 as part of their service offering is risky to you because you could end up shooting up your telephone or telly in frustration at the non-responsiveness during calls that you have to pay them for to reach their service department and talk about your account (for which you already pay the aforementioned king’s ransom). But what if instead of the Keltec, they offered a live, interactive, real-time pop-up video game array complete with photon cannons?

What if instead of hearing yet another low-paid and poorly trained anonymous uncaring voice on the end of the phone, you could pull up a digital display choosing the phone rep’s boss, or, better still, the ability to give a mild taser bee-sting like stun to CEO’s Rupert Murdoch and Ben Verwaayen every time a service commitment was missed or a lie spoken? Now that’s what I’m talkin’ about! That would send sales through the roof. These guys would be as jumpy as cats the number of times they are stung?

OK, how about Tesco then? Spend £100 in store or online get a gun? They would though need to set up an off-site collection point for fear of gun battles breaking out in-store every time the 10:00 am cashiers are paged immediately to the front of the store for a shift that began 15 minutes earlier. “Would all cashiers, pleeeeaaassseeeee report immediately to the front of the store?”

I think the taser idea will keep most out of jail and force massive service retraining. The problem is, knowing these companies and their zero-tolerance approach to customer’s or journalists complaining, we’d be killed in the cross-fire.

OK, maybe it’s not such a good marketing idea then.