I’ve barely recovered from one load of rot than – blow me down! – here comes another

How much corporate twaddle can you cram into one – relatively – short space? Step forward Thomas Cook, champion of the Lonely Hearts Club!

This follows in timely fashion my remarks yesterday about the joy that idiots derive from “lines”.

What beats a line? A picture, for people who can’t read, devised by people who specialise in gobbledygook and approved by people who derive their greatest pleasure from jerking each other off in meetings.

You can bet that everyone in the travel industry shouted out Halleluiah! when they read what follows.

I was going to edit and just leave in the jargon and  cliches. But they constitute  about 97% of the whole thing. So here we go on a memorable trip to corporate In-Your-Dreamsland.

But before we begin: Thomas Cook’s underlying operating loss for the three months to 30 June was £26.5m, compared with a profit of £20.1m a year earlier.

Time for the Corporate Rebrand tossers to move in, right?

Here’s what I read an hour or so ago.

Building on the company’s already strong brand heritage, and as part of its Transformation, The Thomas Cook Groups announced the unification of its brands and market activity under one common symbol, the ‘Sunny Heart’.

The application of the Sunny Heart reflects a simplified and strengthened brand portfolio. It is more than a design refresh as it is leveraging the combined strength of the Group to maximise the Group’s presence in the mind of customers.

… there is evidence that the approach increases both early bookings and online bookings with an added benefit of heightened brand awareness. The Sunny Heart is being rolled out in a way that complements the normal, planned refresh of materials.

The new, unified brand captures the essence of Thomas Cook: how it delivers inspiring personal journeys as the trusted pioneer in global travel. In its shortened form this essence translates to Let’s go! It is a promise made to all stakeholders and for customers it reflects the values that they come to us for, values of trust, personalisation and innovation, and an approach that is high-tech and high-touch across all customer touch points.

The unification of Thomas Cook brands will make it easier for customers to understand the full strength and end-to-end value of the entire Thomas Cook Group coupled with the innovative offering of services and products. It will show more clearly what differentiates the Group and how the Group provides a total experience along every customer touch point – from research, to booking, to anticipation, and to the holiday itself. Importantly the unification will clarify the customer promise of a complete range of inspirational experiences.

Isn’t it wonderful? Wouldn’t you like to know the same three things as me? How precisely did they prove that this made more money? Did they relate it to the time and money invested on the exercise? Was whoever wrote that alive or dead?

Oh, and for luck: to what degree does this sort of garbage make those who have to read it want to quit their jobs?

And for extra luck, what might the same time, money and effort have achieved if applied to thinking of ways to satisfy their customers more and find new ones? Assuming the people involved understand anything about that sort of thing – which seems unlikely.

ONE MORE EXTRA: On the benefits of education.

This was said to students in 1914 by John Alexander Smith, Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy at Oxford.

Gentlemen, you are now about to embark on a course of studies which will occupy you for two years. Together, they form a noble adventure. But I would like to remind you of an important point. Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life, save only this, that if you work hard and intelligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.