Pure Corporate Greed

Allergies

My cat has an allergy to tuna, but won't eat cat food that has meat in it - yep, he'll only eat cat food that contains fish. The vet told me once when I took him in so they could examine the eczema-like sores on his back that he was a 'fishy cat' with 'an allergy to tuna'. I asked the vet, how is that possible? Surely if he's a fishy cat he wouldn't be allergic to tuna? She simply shrugged and told me that 'it's inconvenient, sure; but completely possible.'

Cat Food

Thus began my hunt for cat food that he could eat without looking like he was suffering from a bad case of measles. I found a brand - Dine Melting Soups - and it had three sachets that he could eat without having his allergies triggered:

(I couldn't find a picture for the third; it was purple and also contained Bonito).

My cat and I were blissfully happy for about two years - he no longer chewed his skin every other minute, and I had something I could safely feed him. The sachets cost $1 each and he ate two a day - $14 a week, $28 a fortnight, $56 a month = $672 a year.

Of course, this was too good to last...

Product Changes

For a while they ditched the purple sachet altogether, and I was fine with that - so long as I still had trusty old green and yellow.

Unfortunately, though, they decided to change green and yellow; and sadly, they changed both the main ingredient and the packaging:

I'm not sure why the people over at Mars or Dine or Unilever or whoever it is that owns this subsidiary decided to make changes, but they did, and guess what?

My cat is suffering again:

It was hard to take this picture; he didn't want me to touch the area and thus he wasn't exactly sitting still. 

This doesn't really do the sores justice. They are red, weepy and obviously hurt him a lot. He chews at them all the time. I really feel bad for him. Obviously I have to stop buying this evil cat food. It's about his health more than anything else. 

The culprit, of course, was the TUNA.

Is tuna cheaper than bonito? 

Probably.

Are they trying to move from being a fancy, out of the ordinary 'treat' to a more normalised, every-day cat food? 

Certainly looks like it going by the packaging.

Have they just lost $672 a year? 

Abso-freaking-lutely.

Final Word

I can't believe they did this to me and my cat! I'm absolutely certain the motivation was nothing but pure corporate greed. They were already making a nice profit - $1 a pop is way too expensive for the tiny amount of cat food that was in that sachet - but was that enough for them? No! They had to make MORE profit!

I can tell it was some marketers idea too - you can see it by the change in packaging! I can just imagine them sitting around an oddly shaped conference desk in their sharp, dark corporate suits discussing how best to screw over the consumer.

"Well, consumers are idiots," says the woman with the Dolce Gabana glasses. "So we can pretty much do whatever we like and they'll continue to buy this product. We have their loyalty now." She smirks. The young man with the greasy hair scoffs. "How about we change the Bonito over to Tuna? We'll save thousands a year. Think of it."
"But the Bonito is what makes it so damn fancy," says the middle-aged man in the white suit. "If we change that, then we have to change our whole strategy. We can no longer be 'fancy pants cat food for lonely women who treat their cats like children'."
"Hmmm," (collective).
"I already told you," says Dolce Gabana. "We'll just stop being fancy. We already have them, like I said. They're morons with LOYALTY. We can do WHATEVER WE WANT now. They just have to sit there and TAKE IT."

Well, goodbye Dine. It was a nice relationship while it lasted. But now I tell you what I tell the men I date: you treat me like crap, I walk.

Here's me walking away...

In case you're wondering, I already have an alternative (and it's even more expensive - thanks, Dine!):

Christmas Hypnosis

It reminds me of Pokemons...

And it makes me feel very, very sleepy. What is it?
It's Adrenaline.com.au's latest commercial.




Sorry... What was I saying? Oh yes. Pokemons.

Exploiting your own Children

Juliana Kent, former owner of Outback Jacks, has shared a 'precious' family moment on social media.

She claims that her son Sebastian saved up enough money selling lemonade to buy a pony.

His parents took the money he had saved (they withdrew it from his bank account? Took it from his piggy bank? Stole it from underneath his pillow? It's never actually stipulated) and secretly bought him the pony, then recorded his reaction so that they could post it to social media. Of course the kid cried, and the whole nation let out a collective 'awwwww'. What else would have happened?

Yes... 'Awww'

Juliana then proceeded to do the rounds - The Project, 9 Mornings, etc. after her 'precious' family moment apparently 'went viral'.

Jesus... You can almost see the dollar signs flashing in her eyes.

It's funny, though, how the lemonade her kid sold just happens to have had branding on it already...

They served their own brand-name drinks at their kid's own birthday party a month before the video that went 'viral'.

Pretty good advertising isn't it?

But let's not be naive; I'm pretty sure that featuring the branding on network TV was the plan all along. In fact, I'm positive.

I suppose Juliana, after owning a franchise restaurant (Outback Jacks, remember?), realised that the real money wasn't in the restaurant at all but in the softdrinks they sold on the side, and promptly set about manufacturing some of her own. After that was done she just needed a clever and innovative way to introduce the drink into, let's face it, what is already a heavily saturated market.

What better way to do it than by exploiting her own children?

We live in a world now where people think it's perfectly acceptable to exploit their pets on Youtube for a few bucks... Just as men in the past exploited women, black people, the environment etc. And let's not forget that for years we've been exploiting animals by showing them off in zoos despite the fact this makes them miserable. We exploit horses, and just about any animal that's edible.

Hey, seriously, I figured it was only a matter of time before people turned their sights onto their own children.

If it looks healthy that's good enough

It's amazing something so healthy can taste so good

Not really... If you add enough sugar to anything it tastes pretty damn good. Just look at Coca Cola and Pepsi. Seriously, without all the added sweetness they would taste pretty awful.

Speaking of Coca Cola and Pepsi... One 600ml bottle of Coca Cola contains 63.6 grams of sugar. One Tropical Storm Smoothie from Boost Juice contains 69.1 grams of sugar.

To put these figures into perspective, a teaspoon of sugar is about 4 grams, so if you add two to a cup of tea or coffee, that makes 8 grams. Let's also consider the 20ml of milk that you're adding - which also adds another 2 grams of sugar - and that effectively means that in order to match the sugar in just ONE Boost Juice Smoothie you would need to drink roughly SEVEN cups of tea/coffee.

It seems these days all you have to do to convince people that something is healthy is to simply claim it. Use bright colours in your advertising, hire children to run your business for you, and use special keywords like immune, boost and vitamins, and BOOM - people will buy it, hook, line and sinker.

This multi-millionaire businesswoman has absolutely no qualms about what she's doing - she even has the bare audacity to continue to portray herself as a yoga-loving health food guru to the media. If she had even a shred of decency she'd apologise to everyone for poisoning them with copious amounts of sugar under the guise of offering healthy shakes and then slink away into obscurity. Instead we get to watch her in action on SharkTank where she tries to swallow up good business ideas by offering terrible equity deals to naive, unsuspecting business novices who probably have no idea that the woman is worse than Satan, lying to an unsuspecting, uneducated public who yearns to be healthy but just doesn't have the time in which to realistically achieve it.

What golden gems of advice should the budding entrepreneur expect from Janine Allis the evil marketing genius when taking her equity deal? Perhaps she can skill them in the myriad of ways in which you can most effectively lie to your customers? Or perhaps she can offer them justifications so they can feel better about hiring schoolchildren and underpaying them, effectively having them carry out all the hard work of your business for you? Or maybe she can tell you how to bend over in front of her while she's holding a giant black dildo - because if you accepted an equity deal with her, well, believe it - you're gonna get fucked - you'd just better hope that the contract she made you sign included a clause in which you receive an adequate amount of lube.

Be who you want to be - a drunk

Go to any AA meeting and you'll hear the same stories:

I was so anxious - I just didn't want to be anxious anymore
I just wanted to have more confidence
Alcohol made me feel like I was a better person

It's no coincidence that marketers tap into these same insecurities in order to sell booze. They know damn well why most people of a certain age reach for a drink in the first place. In my mind there's only two types of drinkers, and those two types of drinkers are typified by the two different types of vodka you can buy.

Young people like their alcohol to not taste like alcohol but at the same time be strong enough to get them absolutely hammered. They also don't want to pay too much for the privilege. So their drink of choice more often than not is fruit or pop flavoured vodka.

Easy enough, right? But how to sell vodka to the other type of drinker, the one who isn't necessarily looking to party the night away? Easy. Speak to that inner lack which drove them to drink in the first place. And that's just what this ad does - except it's aimed squarely at men.

I find the list of men that you can 'be' if you want to rather interesting:

• Mahatma Gandhi - nothing about inebriation speaks to me of non-violent resistance, except for when you're drunk and you finally pass out. That part is non-violent
• Sigmund Freud - drunk people don't have enough empathy to be able to see past the egos of other people - and their own egos become hopelessly inflated
• David Hasselhoff - this one is accurate. You can become a wreck of a man whose daughter films him drunkenly eating chicken off the kitchen floor if you drink enough
• Brad Pitt - again this is accurate. By drinking, you too can eradicate enough brain cells to get to the point where you match wits with Brad Pitt's
• James Bond - no... You drink and you can't jump from planes, ski down slopes whilst picking off enemy agents with your machine gun, etc. You need good hand-eye coordination and drinking reduces that
• John Rambo - yes. You can become John Rambo if you drink. In fact, most of us would need to
• Superman - no. Drinking does not give you superhuman strength - it just makes you think you have it

You'll note in the reflection that Sauron is mentioned...

Hot water mind fuck!

Rinnai hot water systems.

They could have chosen any number of ways to sell their hot water systems. So why did they choose to go down this road?

This ad, I believe, tries to solve the problem of selling a hot water system not only to the 'wife' of the household, but also to the 'husband'. And it does both in the same singular ad.

So how does it achieve this?

By playing on the fears of middle aged women and by appealing to the loins of middle aged men.

Blatant Sexism

This ad is, at its core, incredibly sexist.

First off, notice how the male scientists are dressed professionally in lab coats and proper attire.

Now notice how the female scientists are clad only in white lycra catsuits with white high heels and pink eyeshadow. Completely unprofessional. Are they not 'scientists' too? If they were, surely they would be wearing lab coats. Perhaps they aren't worthy of the title of scientist. Perhaps they actually know absolutely nothing of 'science' or 'facts' and thus can't be trusted to make important decisions such as which hot water system should be installed in the household. Perhaps they are simply a piece of ass and nothing more.

Hidden Sex-Appeal

Why does she seem to blend in so seamlessly with the stark white background of the 'Comfort Institute'? I think it's because women watching aren't supposed to notice her presence. Only men, whose eyes are finely tuned to watch out for ass during every possibly moment of every possible day are going to see her.

Maternal Instincts

When the teddy is dipped into the hot water and burnt this plays on the maternal instincts that women have - reinforcing the safety of the Rinnai hot water system, but also working as a way to tap into her even deeper fears - that younger, hotter women are dangerous and pose a very real threat. At this point in the ad, men don't even notice the teddy bear; all they see is the hot piece of ass.

Danger Comparison

Now here's the really insidious part - when the teddy is dipped into the unregulated hot water bath and burnt, it's the sexy young piece of ass who hands the teddy to the head scientist. However, when the teddy is dipped into the Rinnai remote control regulated temperature bath, it's another lab-coated scientist who hands the teddy over.

Why?

I believe this taps into the fears all married women have - that younger, hotter women pose a threat to the safety of their family unit. This threat is subliminally paired with the threat of hot water burning their children and therefore the solution to one problem - to regulate hot water with a Rinnai system - becomes, subliminally, the solution to a deeper, darker and more sinister problem that plagues all women by a kind of mental osmosis.

As if there was ever any doubt to my claims, they go a step further to prove them in other of their ads - by making the young hot piece of ass's eyes glower red in the background - she is evil, she is satanic! Watch out, beware, danger! Threat! Hot = threat!

See the full ad here

Your Breath Stinks... And that's why nobody likes you

I caught this one playing during the airing of The Bachelor (hey - I don't watch the show, it was just on in the background while I was working on my computer).

You'll notice that this ad features subliminal background music; a song with some pretty powerful yet barely audible lyrics:

"I feel so lonesome and I don't know why... You pushed me away without a goodbye... So - why don't you like me? Oh-whoa"

Here's a link to the ad: Wrigley's Extra Television Commercial

We all love a catch up with friends, but not when the coffee hangs around afterwards. Chew Extra for that just-brushed clean feeling.

Then there are pictures of animated cartoon coffee cups being scared off by Extra.

Now, seeing as the ad is for chewing gum, I think we can safely draw the conclusion that it's trying to insinuate that people (in particular, your beloved friends) are pushing you away because your breath stinks and you need to fix it! Fix it right now or people won't ever like you! Because nobody could ever possibly like you for you.

You have to be perfect in every way. Even with friends.