Saturday, February 20th, 2010
The demand of the American Revolution was “No taxation without representation.” It was not “No taxation.”
A hundred years later, Oliver Wendell Holmes frequently repeated the aphorism “Taxes are the price of civilization.”
Now, facing profound national and global problems in the make-it-or-break 21st century, we have numb-nutters running around dressing up like Thomas Paine (who would have hated their guts) while being pandered to by morons like Scott Brown, who defends psychotic, murdering crooks by saying “Certainly, no one likes paying taxes, obviously.”
The childishness of it all is breathtaking. Do you like having a road on which to operate your motor vehicle? A school for your child? Are you one of the dupes who think “our troops” are fighting “for us”? Do you enjoy knowing that the fire department will arrive if your house catches fire or you go into cardiac arrest? Do you admit any contradiction between enjoying these things and Mr. Brown’s (massively dishonest — the Republican Party is never going to reduce the size of government, as doing so would draw a Depression that would make this Great Recession look like a Golden Age of prosperity) advocacy of an utterly juvenile anti-social worldview?
Not that the lying, bought-and-sold Democrats are an ounce better…
Monday, February 15th, 2010
Fools and professional liars sometimes go out of their way to paint big business marketing as inconsequential, ineffectual, a gigantic feather preen.
Of course, that’s turbo-jive. Evidence abounds that marketing alters behavior.
Consider this latest news from Advertising Age:
For the first time in history and by the thinnest of margins, body wash outsold bar soap last year in food, drug and mass outlets tracked by Information Resources Inc., according to data reported by Deutsche Bank — $756.3 million to $754.2 million.
The cause? Corporate toiletries peddlers began aggressively marketing “body wash,” which, thanks mainly to its Earth-destroying, marketing-friendly packaging, carries far higher profit margins than plain old soap bars, to U.S. men:
Since 2003, the year P&G’s Old Spice became the first of the big U.S. brands to try the body-wash market, sales of deodorant bar soap have plummeted nearly 40% to $234.7 million last year. Sales of non-deodorant bar soap — dominated by the more-female-oriented Dove — have grown modestly since that time, just not at the steady double-digit rate of body wash.
Getting out to a head start in front of Unilever’s Axe, which entered body wash in 2004 in the U.S., ultimately didn’t guarantee victory for P&G. Axe may have showed up late, but it’s arguably (and yes, they really do argue) bigger in the category now, having overtaken Old Spice lately in Walmart facings in P&G’s hometown of Cincinnati lately, for example.
If you doubt the power of such efforts, click on this chart:
Change you can believe in…
Friday, February 12th, 2010
Now, beneath his ads for VISA cards, he’s publishing sophomoric excuses for corporate marketing. Disgusting hypocrisy.
Thursday, February 11th, 2010
Apparently, Whoopi Goldberg is now helping the Kimberly-Clark corporation turn more old growth forests into profits and landfill. According to Advertising Age, Goldberg is peddling piss-pads, a.k.a. “light incontinence products” called Poise, on behalf of K-C.
How did K-C’s bold entrepreneurs invent this wondrous advance in human welfare?
In the usual manner.
First, massive layoffs:
The need to reach the target market with a different type of absorbent-underwear product came out during research with women in focus groups. The introduction comes a couple of weeks after Thomas J. Falk, the chief executive of Kimberly-Clark, announced a reorganization that included the closing of 20 plants and the dismissal of about 10 percent, or 6,000, of the worldwide work force.
Mr. Falk said the reorganization was intended to free money to invest in areas like new products, research into consumer behavior and marketing campaigns.
The principal Kimberly-Clark competitor, Procter & Gamble, has been thriving of late by following just such a path, generating additional consumer interest in otherwise staid product categories with continual rounds of “news” in the form of new products under familiar brand names like Bounty, Charmin and Mr. Clean along with new brands like Febreze and Swiffer.
Next, use of focus groups to find a weakness:
And the reason they don’t want to talk about it is that they associate it, even the young women, with aged incontinence. They immediately say, “Holy cow, I’m doing to be in Depends tomorrow.’ And that’s like one foot in the grave to them.”
K-C also makes Depend, but it’s not for light bladder leakage, which also has many causes besides age.
Women are more likely to have the condition, Mr. Meurer said, if they’ve had hysterectomies or multiple children, if they’re heavier or if they’re athletes, particularly runners and tennis players.
“The marketing task is how do we move [Poise] out of the aged incontinence [mind-set]?” Mr. Meurer said. Realistically, he’s also trying to move it out of the adult incontinence sections of stores, where it sits alongside canes, Depends and orthopedic support products, and instead adjacent to feminine-care products, with K-C has already succeeded in doing at about half of U.S. Stores. [Ad Age, February 10, 2010]
Finally, big spending from the layoff savings/production speed-up, to flatter and manipulate the “targets” into buying more paper underpants:
The idea of an active lifestyle is played up in the ads.
For instance, a print ad proclaims: “This body can follow the beat. Lead the race. Move chairs, sofas. Mountains, too.” A television commercial declares: “It’s wonderful what your body can do if you’ve a mind to let it. Even bladder weakness just takes a bit of Poise.”
The commercial presents a man and woman in their 40’s or 50’s at home, in a romantic dance. At one point, his hand lingers over her derrière – implying that although she is wearing a Poise panty, it is sheer enough to elude detection.
“We wanted to make it a little sexy,” said Terril Smith, a creative director at Ogilvy New York who was the art director on the campaign, working with Alice Whitmore, creative director and copywriter.
“We’re saying: ‘You shouldn’t have to lose the intimacy. It’s discreet enough that he can have his hand on your back. You can still be as active as you want to be,’ ” Ms. Smith said. “People are keeping more active and are wanting to feel they can do more things longer.”
Mr. Meurer didn’t disclose spending, but said the campaign represents by far the biggest marketing outlay in Poise’s 14-year history, and will be worth the spending if the brand can dramatically change the nature — or lack — of conversation about the problem it addresses.
Monday, February 8th, 2010
From economist Emmanuel Saez, reporting on the share of personal income going to various percentiles of the U.S. households:
Year 2007 [was] the second highest year on record since 1913 almost equaling 1928, the record year when the top percentile share reached 23.9 percent. Even within the top percentile, the gains from 2006 to 2007 are extremely concentrated. The top .01% (top 14,988 US families, making at least $11.5m in 2007) share increased from 5.46% in 2006 to 6.04% in 2007 leaving well behind the 1928 peak of 5.04 percent.
One wonders whether the year 1928 doesn’t have rather a great deal of relevance as history repeating itself. 2007 looks an awful lot like that former pinnacle, with eerily similar effects seemingly ensuing, with the crucial difference that, behind the marketing facade, Obama is Hoover redux, not FDR II.
Friday, February 5th, 2010
In light of the recent Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v. FEC, I thought I’d share another reminder of the genesis of the modern conglomerate business corporation.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, when major investors in the United States found themselves in a confounding situation.
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