Amusing Marketing Tidbits
10Feb. 10
99% of marketing material is stupid, which in addition to being a source of frustration can be a source of entertainment. Here are two items I recently encountered.
Item the First
While holidaying in northern New South Wales over the new year, I came across this pamphlet about healing and Reiki. It was the most hilarious thing I’ve ever read, cosmically dense in its use of alt med stock phrases and cliches. Click on each image to embiggen.
My favourite bits (highlighted):
- Uses all 12 strands of DNA — Well that’s a relief! I hate those dodgy therapies that treat just 11 “strands” leaving 1 unattended.
- Accelerates the body’s ability and assists recovery and rehabilitation — Classic quack marketing speak, this avoids the legal pitfalls of claiming an actual effect whilst doing its best to imply that very effect.
- Reiki…can also be used on animals and plants, motor cars etc — This made me laugh hard for a while. I guess I should cancel all those car services and just stroke the engine without touching it. On the other hand, if this worked Reiki practitioners should be in the breadbaskets of the world tending to crops smitten by pests and disease and increasing the world’s food security.
This is all brought to you by “Jayne Seymour”. Aah Jayne, the impossible-to-google practitioner who thereby can not be brought to justice even if we had an effective health claims regulation and policing system, you’ve done it again!
Item the Second
I’ve started buying ALDI’s brand of organic soy milk, mainly because it tastes much better than any soy milk I’ve ever had — it’s actually creamy and full-bodied. But the way they market themselves is unimpressive:
“As nature intended” is about the crudest form of of the naturalistic fallacy I’ve seen — rarely do they go to the trouble of being this obvious. However I am troubled about this soy milk being “with no chemicals”. Were this the case I assume they’d either
- be subject to charges of fraud for selling nothing
- be eligible for Homeopathic Manufacturer of the Year
- have made a great scientific/engineering advance since they can bottle up a perfect vacuum all in a simple plastic packet.
You might say “if they’re selling organic soy milk it makes business sense for them to pander to the beliefs of their demographic even though some of these beliefs might not make much sense.” But this brings out the most amusing thing — I realised there was one important thing this packet was NOT saying. Usually soy products go out of their way to tell you they’re not genetically modified. Now is it really plausible that they’d have failed to include this message? It would have made for a perfect match for the milk packet. It seems more reasonable — and ironic — to suppose that they’re using GM soy beans for a product marketed as Nature’s IntentTM.
I almost wish products were labeled GM so that I could pick those out instead of avoiding them*. Well, this one’s in probably in the bag — assuming it’s GM you can make an anti-anti-GM purchasing statement whilst enjoying a product that tastes a lot better than any similar ones that tout their freedom from GM.
February 10th, 2010 at 9:58 am
Maybe you’re on to something with that homeopathic soy milk thing … siluted in dairy milk? You did say it was the creamiest you’ve tasted.
February 10th, 2010 at 12:43 pm
That would be amusing but alas very unlikely — I can taste the foul stench of cow teat juice from kms away…
February 10th, 2010 at 1:56 pm
The one thing soy milk is NOT is a natural product. The process to extract a drinkable soy ‘milk’ involves a lot of unatural processes. I am intrigued however as to why you would choose a GM over a non-GM product as from what I understand the genetic modifications for soy are not related to its nutrition values thus giving GM only an agri-business advantage over non-GM rather than a taste/nutrition advantage. (ie — to the consumer does it matter at all?)
February 10th, 2010 at 4:41 pm
Grendel, most of GM is not nutritional, it’s more about resistance to pesticides or pests.
The nutritional claims of organic foods are bogus.
February 10th, 2010 at 6:35 pm
I think the whole notion of a natural food product is a bit meaningless anyway. But yes, soy milk is especially processed, more so than other foods.
The idea of choosing GM is more of a snide counterclaim to people who buy non-GM foods because of a misguided notion that they’re better. However, although I acknowledge the huge problems with the business practices and processes of large agricultural corporations, I do support GM as a concept since this is what I think is likely to put food on the table of what will soon be 8 – 10 billion people.
Of course it is possible that certain GM soy is better or worse nutritionally (or tastes better or worse) than non-GM soy, but I don’t have the details.
February 11th, 2010 at 12:23 am
Sounds like you are about where I am on GM then — no problem with it in theory, particularly when it is used to improve the plant. My issue is with the fact that the main modification has been to provide pesticide resistance to a pesticide owned by the same company doing the GM mod — a marketing stitch-up with some amazing complex and detailed contractual binds for agribusinesses.
February 19th, 2010 at 8:07 pm
I guess “chemical” is now a pseudonym for “synthetic or industrially derived molecular compound”.
Re: GM foods — given the fact that in primates, at least some DNA alleles have to be involved in several different processes at different times, I find GM foods quite a worry — they have not been tested for very long and maybe they might make one protein fold the other way … is this not something to be skeptical about.