Wednesday, 17 September 2008

• Currently Reading Husband-Coached Childbirth (Fifth Edition): The Bradley Method of Natural Childbirth By Robert A. Bradley, Marjie Hathaway, Jay Hathaway, James Hathaway see related

  The Greatest Marketing Ploys of my Lifetime (That I Can Think of Right Now)

  The marketing wizards exploit our psychologies all the live long day, and our only power against them is to realize how ridukulus their diabolical schemes are.  So here are a few observations I've made in which I hope we can all enjoy a boisterous guffaw.

  1.  Labeling food products as "Trans-fat free."  Trans-fat is an artificial laboratory product that our bodies aren't really able to break down, so they build up in our arteries.  Therefore, by being responsible and socially conscious food manufacturers, they certainly bring a new level of reassurance to my heart when they stamp their "Trans-Fat Free" seal o' approvals on their products.  In other words they are saying, "Congratulations, we spared you a heinous artificial poison that should have never been in food anyway."

  2. Pepsi One.  They already had a diet option with no Calories, but they really stepped it up by adding a Calorie.  That's what I call progress.  I assume this is their attempt to one-up Coke Zero, and I guess they did, sort of.  That's like adding a single gram of trans-fat to your bag of chips just to prove you can do more than the other guys.

  3. Eco-friendly water bottles.  Bottled water is already hyper-lame.  Some goof convinced our country that you have to drink 2 gallons of water a day, and then the bottling companies tricked us into forgetting that cold tap water costs like $5/month, so here we are buying pallets of bottled water from our local grocer.  But to top it off, they've convinced us that we're helping earth by buying their extra thin plastic bottles that they only started because it saves them a bunch of money.  And they're charging the same price.

  4. Putting the word "Xtreme" in the name of anything.  Why buy just antiperspirant, when you could have XTREME deodorant.  Why spell it "extreme" when you can spell it "XTREME!"

  5. Any James Bond movie.  For some reason, there's always this hope that the new one will be better.  This is especially true when they anoint a new James Bond who has even bluer eyes and an even more British accent.  But you know what...they all blow, like Kenny G on a bagpipe.

  6. The Magic Bullet food processor (As Seen on TV!).  This is a fantastic product if you're looking to create a full 1 ounce of ground-up goodness.  I've seen these things in action, and they don't do anything more than what my cheap blender does, and they have the volume capacity of about 2 grapes.

  7. The Power Glove.  I think we all remember the disappointment that shattered our young hearts when we saw what a bogus piece of crap this was.  I couldn't ever get Little Joe to deliver a left jab, and you had to use the built-on controller for most of your moves anyway.  Freakin' lame, Nintendo.  On the up side, the Wii is a fine redemption of this failed project.

  Well, I'm sure you all can think of some more good ones.  I'm gonna go wash some whites.

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