I got a catalog in the mail last week. It’s one of those that make you really curious about what marketers think they know about you.

It was from Beretta – you know, the company founded in 1526 by gunsmith Bartolomeo Beretta? [Really, you didn’t know that? And you think of yourself as well informed.] Beretta is probably best known for the .25 Beretta model 418, James Bond’s standard-issue handgun in the first half-dozen of the Ian Fleming novels. The company is probably more familiar in the DC area for having a manufacturing facility in Accokeek, Maryland, less than 20 miles from the Capitol.

The catalog offered a wide variety of manly must-have items that don’t require a federal firearms license, like warthog-tooth keychain fobs to impress the ladies, 11-in-one shotgun tools because it’s a nuisance carrying around 11 tools with you all the time in case you suddenly need to perform shotgun maintenance during a business meeting, Beretta-brand gun oil (just a dab behind the ears, girls), magazine extenders to hold more bullets in small semiautomatic pistols (buy a bigger gun!), laser sights so that you can blind your target before killing it/him/her, and “tactical knives.” (I suppose that’s a different market segment from all the companies offering strategic knives.)

Obviously, all of that is cool stuff and I had fun with the catalog. So why would I be wondering about their marketing profile for me? Well, the most obvious reason is that I’ve been married to an arch-pacifist for 10 years. There are no firearms in the house, and have not been for at least several decades. So why would Beretta waste the postage necessary to introduce me to their current offerings?

And then, on page 26, there was the answer.

I realized immediately that it was an obvious and overdue expansion of their product line. After all, when friends gather around the campfire at the end of the day, few things go together better than alcohol and firearms.

“Hey, Jerry, what wine pairs best with an Uzi?”

Gun Perignon by Ed Ward is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.