Archive for the 'Assholes' Category
Wednesday, March 28th, 2012
Marketing as Sociopathy
How do they sleep at night, after spending their working days helping corporate capitalists, at great expense and costs to end users, trick people into doing what the overclass requires, the planet and the people be damned?
Advertising Age today has a column by one Allie Savarino Kline, chief marketing officer at aspiring data scraper 33Across. Ms. Kline reports that, while “Google, Yahoo, Quantcast and my firm 33Across alone protect data on well over 2 billion people” and are moving to exploit that “big data” to map the “social DNA” that surrounds corporate brands, some marketers are hesitating to jump into that endeavor.
The frame of reference Kline chooses is telling:
Monday, March 19th, 2012
Scott Goodson is Wrecking the World
Here at TCT, we occasionally like to connect the expansion of the big business marketing universe to the names and faces pulling the levers, on the theory that they deserve some small proper credit for their sociopathy.
Today’s featured creep is Scott Goodson, pictured at left. Mr. Goodson is what I think of as a marketer of marketing. The M-o-M’s schtick is to exaggerate some small tweak to the long-established tricks of the trade and peddle it back to “the business community” as the next big thing.
Goodson’s version of this is so-called “Movement Marketing,” or the effort to make marketing campaigns look and feel like they are “uprisings” — Uprising is the title of Goodson’s new book — driven by ordinary people’s deepest passions and hopes for a better world. Mimicry of the frustrated spirit of the age, in other words.
Goodson, of course, always presents some window dressing about the authenticity of his scheme, suggesting that it is somehow a legitimate expression of “a shared passion to make a change for the better.”
That, however is just the cover story, as Goodson admits that “Movement Marketing” is indeed merely “just a clever way for a brand to get you [the customer] involved and ultimately buy their product.” The core idea is that:
[I]n these times, people will look to brands to be leaders and change agents. People will pay attention to how you conduct yourself, what you believe in, what you’re willing to take a stand on. If they like what they see, they’ll rally around your brand.
What does it mean in practice?
As described by one of Goodson’s associates, movement marketing accomplishes wondrous things like — wait for it — moving the tree pulp faster on behalf of Procter & Gamble:
There’s a new movement afoot, a new way for the world to do business. And it’s inspired, in part, by Pampers.
Yes, Pampers: the iconic American brand, the first mass-market disposable diapers, a product that many of you probably waddled around in in your earliest years. But by 1997, when Procter & Gamble asked me to oversee Pampers Europe, it had become the company’s poorest performer in terms of market share growth and profitability. My team eventually identified the problem: the brand was so focused on a single benefit of the product–dryness–that it was no longer resonating with the evolving needs of moms.
As I describe in my recent book, Grow, we traveled the globe to talk to mothers about their concerns, and eventually created a new brand ideal: Pampers didn’t just keep babies dry; rather, it was a product that would partner with parents throughout their baby’s stages of physical, social and emotional development. The result? We had a mission that inspired all of the brand’s stakeholders–marketing, sales, manufacturing, engineering and suppliers, as well as consumers–and the business that brought in $3.4 billion in 1997 is now a $9 billion business.
I was continually reminded of Pampers as I served as P&G’s Global Marketing Officer from 2001 to 2008, as I saw more and more that the brands that existed to improve peoples lives–to make them easier, more joyful or more interesting–were the brands that enjoyed the most success. And it wasn’t just broadcasting these ideals to the consumer that made it happen; true success only occurred when everyone involved in the brand shared and embraced the ideal. Was business growth ultimately driven by brands that are truly dedicated to fundamental human values?
Inspiring, deeply democratic stuff, isn’t it? Some yuppie-bespectacled jerks tricked some targets into telling them what they care about, and thereby learned to craft better, more resonant marketing hyperbole that sold more paper diapers for a Global 500 corporation.
Truly, we live in an Age of Miracles!
Saturday, February 4th, 2012
Sheryl Sandberg Sucks
The New York Times today runs a shameless butt-kiss piece on Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. Contrary to the thesis of the NYT, which is that Sandberg is somehow a new sort of feminist as well as a “self-made” (a word used twice in the story) business genius, Sandberg might actually be even more odious than either Facebook or its CEO Mark Zuckerberg, both heavyweight champeens in the field of being hard to take.
According to the story, Sandberg considers it her mission to deny the impact of social structure and political policy on women. “[I]n her view,” the Times reporter explains, women “must take responsibility for their careers and not blame men for holding them back.”
Ms. Sandberg sees herself as more than an executive at one of the hottest companies around — more, too, than someone who will soon rank among the few self-made billionaires who are women. She sees herself as a role model for women in business and technology. In speeches, she often urges women to “keep your foot on the gas pedal,” and to aim high.
And, as she engages in such trite talk about “men” and fails to mention social class or the backward state of U.S. family welfare programs, exactly how self-made is Ms. Sandberg?
According to her 2004 NYT wedding announcement, “She is a daughter of Adele and Joel Sandberg of Miami. The bride’s father, an ophthalmologist, is a partner in Eye Surgery Associates, a group practice in Hollywood, Fla.”
Well, there you have it. Aren’t those the same basic conditions facing all little girls? Daddy’s a surgeon and I’m prepping for Harvard — I refuse to slip and have to go to FSU! And baseball starts at third base, right?
And is Sandberg spending her every hour trying to turn Facebook’s billions into better services, as her creepy CEO would have you presume? Um, unless you’re a major Procter & Gamble shareholder, not quite:
Part of Ms. Sandberg’s role has been to cultivate relationships with large advertisers seeking new ways to engage with customers — particularly female ones — online. She was instrumental in signing up advertisers like Procter & Gamble. After several meetings with Facebook, Procter chose the platform for a new Secret deodorant campaign aimed at young women.
“P.& G. wants to be where the people are, and more and more people are spending their time on social sites,” says Alex Tosolini, vice president of Procter’s global e-business unit. “The purpose of our Secret campaign was to inspire women of all ages to be more fearless.”
It’s a message that sounds similar to Ms. Sandberg’s. And it bumped domestic sales of Secret deodorant by 9 percent in the first six months of the campaign and raised Secret’s market share by 5 percent from the period a year earlier.
Glory, glory hallelujah! What great times we live in!
Wednesday, December 7th, 2011
Another Reason to Tax the Rich, and Hard
There is, of course, no such thing as a $6,200 cell phone. Except, of course, that there is. It’s called the Vertu Constellation. It’s made by Nokia, and has apparently sold more than 300,000 copies.
Mental illness is obviously as epidemic as ever within the overclass.
It’s also something of an IQ test, this Vertu geegaw. See if you can spot the pseudo-intellectualisms, flatteries, and effete product differentiations in this promo blurb:
Constellation is the first handset with a full touch screen from Vertu. Designed with simple elegance at its core, each Constellation is handmade using state-of the art technologies and manufacturing techniques including 8 megapixel camera with ruby surround, hard worked leather and our unique high fidelity sounds system. With one delicate touch you can navigate effortlessly and intuitive [sic] to explore the exclusive services available and a range of carefully curated apps providing bespoke services and information at your fingertips.
Lulz and barfz.
Thursday, September 15th, 2011
Foxes Blame Farmer for Henhouse Massacre
So, the CBS Evening News has been running a series of interviews with important figures it holds, in its unwavering commitment to objective journalism, to have special insight and ability to diagnose what’s wrong with the U.S. economy. Who are these figures, to whom we are supposed to defer? You guessed it: Corporate CEOs!
Take a look at this clip of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz:
Schultz acknowledges that capitalists are hoarding cash. Why are they doing that, according to him? “The only reason is…the anxiety and uncertainty that exists about the political system.”
One could certainly ask CBS why a billionaire who started a coffee shop and holds that highest and most relevant of intellectual credentials – a 1975 bachelor’s degree in Communications from Northern Michigan University – gets to say anything on national TV about what ails the political economy in 2011.
Anyhow, let’s instead change the characters here, shall we? Let’s imagine that foxes have been devouring hens from the henhouse on Farmer Smith’s farm.
CBS: Mr. Fox and Farmer Smith, why are there so few hens in the henhouse these days? How do we rebuild the population in there? Mr. Fox, since you invented farming, let’s start with you. What the problem out there?
Fox: Well, we all know how delicious hens are [belches and picks teeth], don’t we? The one and only reason they are dwindling has to do with how Farmer Smith is paying for the tractor. Will he use cash? His credit card? How can we foxes know what to do next, when we have such a crisis of confidence about that tractor payment?
Farmer Smith: Some might say I should put a door on the henhouse and start shooting foxes. But everybody knows foxes are the engine of any productive farm, so we must actually open the windows on the henhouse, too. Meanwhile, I’ll be meeting with my neighbor farmers to consider how we should pay off our tractors. Soon, we’ll all be up to our elbows in chickens!
Monday, September 12th, 2011
Now We Know: Jackie Kennedy Was a Moron
This has to do with political marketing, but check out what the upper-class bimbo Jackie O had to say about reality. If MLK was a fraud, what, pray tell, was JFK?
As usual, you have to look at places like TCT for any actual logic on these topics, despite the supposed central glory of the personages involved.
Now we know why they sat on this for 47 years. What a pinhead!
