4 weird Parlotones marketing mashups through the years

Whether you like the band’s music or not, you can’t deny that South African rockers The Parlotones are marketing powerhouses, owing to its partnerships with a ton of brands over the years.

Let’s be frank though: some of these endorsements are just strange fits. So we picked a few standout cases.

The Parlotones had their own range of wine

I’m not a wine person, so I can’t tell you whether The Parlotones-branded range is delicate on the palate or scalding to the throat. Anyway, the band teamed up with Hands on Wine and Woolworths for this interesting initiative.

The first wine was a red, their second product was a white wine, and their third was a rosé — all were sold at Woolworths stores. And of course, the wines were named after their songs.

They also had their own branded laptop and netbook

Yep, the musicians launched their own laptop back in 2010 courtesy of South African tech distributor Rectron, as a branded version of the Gigabyte M1305.

As for specifications, you were looking at an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU, 2GB of RAM, a 500GB hard drive and a 13.3-inch 1366×768 display.

In an interesting move, the laptop also had an optional docking station, delivering an Nvidia GeForce GT220 graphics chip to augment the crappy integrated graphics hardware at the time.

If that was too expensive fans also had a Parlotones-branded netbook available from Rectron.

Hungry? They had KFC boxes too

One of the more conventional partnerships (in comparison to the rest of the list) saw the band team up with Kentucky Fried Chicken for a special meal box.

The Parlotones-branded Snack Box was part of a wider campaign by KFC, in an attempt to entice students to the chain of restaurants.

The Parlotones also had shoes (named after a song)

Believe it or not, but the band also released footwear, adding to their diverse list of partnerships.

The band teamed up with Italian footwear maker Superga to release several pairs of shoes, with the most notable a pair of sneakers dubbed Sleepwalker. And if you’re familiar with the theme by now, Sleepwalker is the name of a Parlotones’ single as well.