Category: Business

Contempt

Business, Eco-Crap, Politics, Watermelons

One of my favorite cartoon strips of all time was the late (and much-missed) Johnny Hart’s B.C. series.  The single cartoon which tickled me most when I first read it, maybe forty years ago, was this exchange:

“Oh Great Guru, what is the definition of contempt?”
“Winning the Husband Of The Year Award, and sending your mistress to give your acceptance speech.”

I have a new definition of contempt, and there’s nothing funny about it.  Try this one:

A key lawmaker reacted in disbelief Tuesday when a Biden cabinet official said the climate change agenda took priority over the livelihoods of blue collar workers because “there’s a lot of jobs.”

You have to read the entire exchange to get the full flavor of the contempt that senior government employees people (like this watermelon Deb Haaland) have for the working class.

And we know that they despise the working class even more because they support someone like Donald Trump, who actually does care about blue-collar jobs.  So the Greens get a double win:  ecology “protection” and punishing Trump voters.

How nice for them.

Unaffected, Yet Still Amused

Corporate Wokism, Marketing / Advertising

As someone who has never drunk more than a mouthful of “light” beer (true story:  I tasted a Lite when I first arrived here, didn’t finish the drink, and never touched another of the type ever again), the brouhaha surrounding Bud Light’s marketing decision to elevate some girlyboy to be the brand spokesman has left me totally unmoved — well, apart from bursting out in derisive laughter, that is.

I don’t have a sexy MBA from some elite academic institution, so I’m hardly one to judge this latest example of woke stupidity [redundancy alert].  Nevertheless, here are some core principles I’ve discovered along the way, in a career that spanned over three decades of marketing and advertising.

Marketing Rule #1:  You never neglect (never mind alienate) your existing customer base.  They are the ones who pay your salaries and keep your production lines moving.

Marketing Rule #2:  Once your brand is established, you never chase after “new” customers, but concentrate on getting your existing customers to use your product more.  This is both intuitive and cost-effective, except perhaps to an inexperienced person with a sexy MBA from some elite academic institution.

Marketing Rule #3:  You never make radical changes to your marketing or advertising strategy, especially when it comes into direct conflict with the philosophy of the first two rules.

Marketing Rule #4:  You never let the latest “thing” drive changes to your marketing strategy, especially if that latest “thing” conflicts directly with your brand’s core principle (Unique Selling Proposition, ethos, whatever) and customer base.

And for senior management:  if anyone in your marketing structure — executives, ad agency, promotion company, whatever — suggests anything that flies in the face of the above four principles, fire them immediately before they get to make those changes.

Understand that they’re not being fired for making a mistake.  They’re being fired for deliberately ignoring the canon of the marketplace.

Sequential Humor

Marketing / Advertising

I’ve spoken about these guys before, but this is the best.

Executive summary:  Company comes up with cheeky ad which is generally loved, but which (of course) offends a few (literally) people, so they have to take it down.

Here’s the offending (not offensive) ad:

Here’s their response post-takedown:

And here’s their latest:

Perfect, as advertised.  If I were in the market for some backyard fake grass, I wouldn’t consider anyone other than Great Grass.

Ya Thank?

Business

As any fule kno, you need to have a lot of self-discipline to work unsupervised at a job, any job, with a high degree of productivity.  (Self-employment doesn’t count.)

Lotta fules out there:

In the aftermath of the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), the 16th biggest bank in the country, many are left wondering what went wrong. Both current and former employees have stated that the bank’s support of remote work is a contributing factor.

Well, duh.  When even a wunderkind  like that Facebook twerp is thinking about ending laze-at-home and bringing the worker bees back into the hive, you have to know that the writing is on the wall.

Of all the bullshit ideas perpetrated on the public by the WuFlu panic, WFH was easily one of the worst.

A WHAT?

Business

This is kind of an interesting story:

A wealthy divorcee has sold her luxury home to fund a new life on the high seas.  Mimi Bland, 59, is one of hundreds of high-fliers buying cabins on maritime firm Storylines’ luxury residential cruise ship, MV Narrative.  The liner will go around the world once every three years continuously with stops in ports across the globe.

So far, so good, although the ship’s name did cause a momentary twitch of the nose — “narrative” is not what I’d call a romantic name — but the question which arose as I was reading is:  that’s all well and good, but eventually she’s going to need some income to pay for all that luxury, i.e. a job.  Which is when my nose nearly twitched right off my face.

She plans to work as a mindfulness mentor while on board.

Great Kafka’s throbbing phallus:  WTF is a “mindfulness mentor”?

I thought I had seen some bullshit jobs (and titles) in my time — “diversity consultant”, “human resources manager” and “psychologist” come to mind — but this one takes the Golden Turd Award.

For someone hammering hard on the door of 60, our prospective mindfulness mentor is quite a babe;  but aside from being mindful of her boobs, I can’t actually think what she’d bring to any sane man’s party.

 

Unless “mindfulness mentor” is just another modern term for “sex worker”, but I’m completely out of touch in that area as well.  I report, you decide.

One Or The Other

Corporate Wokism, Literature

If it’s not Gummint fucking us over, it’s Gummint Lite (amazon.com) and its suppliers:

Owners of Roald Dahl ebooks are having their libraries automatically updated with the new censored versions containing hundreds of changes to language related to weight, mental health, violence, gender and race. Readers who bought electronic versions of the writer’s books, such as Matilda and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, before the controversial updates have discovered their copies have now been changed.

Puffin Books, the company which publishes Dahl novels, updated the electronic novels, in which Augustus Gloop is no longer described as fat or Mrs Twit as fearfully ugly, on devices such as the Amazon Kindle.

Dahl’s biographer Matthew Dennison last night accused the publisher of “strong-arming readers into accepting a new orthodoxy in which Dahl himself has played no part.”

I think it’s the “automatically” part that gets to me — even though I don’t have Kindle or any ebooks.

Thanks but no thanks. Paper, Dead Tree, whatever you want to call it, are mine, all mine. As for Kindle: turning them into “kindling” would be my suggestion.