When will you get it? We don’t give a hoot what you call yourself. We just want better service.
Have a look at this, then ask yourself one or two questions. Such as “Who cares?” “Are you serious?” And “Haven’t you got better things to do? It is a mailing sent to my colleague Gerald from his “utilities” firm – click on the pictures to see them full size.
Let us all pause for a moment of silent meditation and ask what led to this.
First these people paid one bunch of shysters to come with the name Veolia, which sounds like a brand of skin cream.
And you can be damn sure squillions were wasted on a new “corporate identity”and lots of waffle about it.
After a while they paid another set of creative cowboys to repeat the process and come up with another name – which still fails to tell you what they do.
Then they squandered even more on a fancy mailing to tell their customers about this exercise in corporate masturbation.
And they lied. “The owners are paying for this, not you.”
And who do you suppose pays the owners? The Pope? Secret beings from outer space? Could it, just by chance, be the customers?
You might expect that with times being hard, and people fed up with rising bills any sane firm would be busy trying to cut out waste and do better.
But no: many seem to be devoting more time and effort than ever before to crawling up their own arses.
There are several symptoms.
One is squandering time and money on rebranding then wasting even more on telling their customers, who couldn’t care less. All flawlessly demonstrated above.
A second is spewing out astounding volumes of turgid jargon.
A third is telling lies any intelligent person can see through in a minute. See above again.
Others including a perverse delight in bum-numbing meetings to discuss the above sins listed, but I can’t spare the time to go into that.
THANK YOU for your comments, all of which are appreciated, and I’m sorry I can’t reply to them all. I am a busy old coot.
Love it, Drayton…read this shortly after gagging on a proposed policyholder mailing which opens: We are proud to announce that, in recognition and profound appreciation of our longstanding relatinship with you, we have designed blah blah….balls! I’ll be busy for the rest of the day re-writing this nonsense!
I love you Drayton…
Corporate Masturbation…. so perfectly described
cheers
Warren
Dear World, I would like to inform you that pelope are not getting the right medicine in countries like Mozambique. Because as they were babies they dont get their vaccinations and that will make it harder for them to fight colds and flus. We can stop this so you can go on to the save the children website and fill in a petition to stop pelope dying and give them the vaccinations they need.There are kids out there as important as us and we treat them worse.I think we should help them and give them their vaccinations.
I always that the old name represented an instrument played by someone dealing with with dyslexia. But Affinity Water?
Clearly, the CEO Mr Bienfait (Well Done?) now regards one of Handel’s better known works as a more appropriate basis for the company name.
Incredible.
Martin Smith sent me this after reading the above
Following on from your latest blog post about “Affinity Water” formerly “Veiin ola”, I felt compelled to send you this……….
Businessinsider.com – Toyota is changing its tagline for the first time since 2004. The new tagline is “Let’s Go Places,” replacing “Moving Forward.” The effort came from six roster shops: Saatchi & Saatchi, Dentsu America, Conill, Burrell,…
How many agencies does it take to change one stupid tag line for another? How many cars don’t go forward? How many cars won’t go places? Is there a big neon ad in the sky reading “Wanted: Morons for Corporate Marketing Jobs?”
931824 510261Hey, you used to write great, but the last few posts have been kinda boring
Sorry about that. In fact that is a repost of one from last September. My writing style hasn’t really changes that much since I started … back in 1956:-)