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Veldrain wrote:

 gorgon wrote:
Perhaps the all-time best descriptive marketing line is 'natural'.

Arsenic, in all fairness, is completely natural and hence good for you

It's worse than that; 'natural' has no legally defined definition. You can put it on plastic shrink wrap if you want.

Yeah, I worked for a while for a company that sold Xylitol, which was marketed as a 'natural' alternative to sugar. Xylitol, for those who don't know, is indeed made from a compound that occurs naturally in certain plants, but is manufactured through a laboratory process involving several acids and other chemicals to strip the xylitol out of the fibres. Hardly a 'natural' process.

To add to the fun, xylitol made from birch trees was marketed as being superior to the stuff made from corn, despite the process that produces it resulting in them being chemically identical. It would be like extracting, say, pure water from a strawberry, and pure water from a potato, and claiming that the water from the strawberry is somehow 'better' than the other.

Dodgyness all around, and it would have encouraged me to not use the stuff myself even if it didn't give me migraines...

 insaniak wrote:
'Organic' bottled water also makes me snicker.

"Organic Pure Himalayan pink salt".

Natural salt is WHITE. PURE salt is white. Sodium+chlorine. Pink salt is pink because of iron and other IMPURITIES in it, so cannot by definition be "pure". It's also NOT mined in the Himalayas.

Back in the day pure salt was a premium, the gold standard of salt. Then there was a process invented to easily make massive amounts of it. Now the tables have turned, with premium salt being the kind with more dirt in it


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 insaniak wrote:
It would be like extracting, say, pure water from a strawberry, and pure water from a potato, and claiming that the water from the strawberry is somehow 'better' than the other.

Sounds like the next stage of homeopathic medicine!

Homeopathy has evolved since its early days. Those in charge realised that the magical water cure was getting too much fire from science and sanity so they spliced it with herbal remedies. So modern Homeopathic medicine is both a mix of water-magic and herbal - which is very sad because good herbal is real medicine and thus does have real benefits that are scientifically proven. So they've brought in some legitimate along with the illegitimate which lets them keep going.

 gorgon wrote:
Perhaps the all-time best descriptive marketing line is 'natural'.

Especially given that it was only around a couple years ago now that "Big Corn" was able to lobby (re: pay) the USDA enough, or congress, or whomever, to allow foodstuffs sweetened with High Fructose Cornsyrup to be labeled as "natural sweetener"



And, from the single course I had in marketing during my MBA I'll say this for the effectiveness of mass market commercials: often times it isn't so much about attracting you as a customer, right now. In some of the examples brought up the aim is a bit different. Take car commercials, sure they may want you in the dealership right now financing a new $90k pick up truck. But the reality is, they know the average american only buys every three years. So, the car commercials are about a constant presence and constant influence on your future purchase. . . If you're a Ford guy now, Ram and Chevy want to influence you to their product, next time you're around. Same thing with beer commercials: its about trying to influence you away from one brand toward another. Course, beer they don't often cite another brand (like, no mentions of "taste tests show blah blah blah" stuff) the way automotive does. Of course, what has a much bigger influence on big ticket items, such as automotive purchases, appliances and the like, is really the customer service at the local level. So, I work in a car dealership's parts department, and I can't tell you how many customers I've won over simply by treating customers better than another parts/service department. If people feel mistreated or ripped off in their car purchase, they are going to go elsewhere.


I would also say, based on that MBA course, no one is as immune as they think. Sorry, we just aren't. . . Sure, we can all post here about absurd ads, logical fallacies, volume levels, etc. etc. but from a marketers standpoint: they already won. . . They got you thinking about the ad/product outside of the space of the advertisement. Which is, ultimately the point of advertising. . . See, one of the best strategies for ads is, like the Superbowl in the US, on monday after the game, you go in to your place of employment, and "omg, did you see that commercial? sooooo funny man!!!". The ad was successful in getting head space beyond the 30 seconds it took to watch it. Even if you don't purchase, your talking about it to someone else in your sphere can cause them to purchase, and someone else talking about an ad/product can cause you to purchase it. Now, I cannot argue the effectiveness of advertising all that well, as I only had one course on the subject during my uni time, but I had a few cross classes with folks doing an MSM (master of science in marketing), and I know they could run circles around all of us on whats going on behind the scenes in marketing. Of course, they would be linking things together in the totality of marketing rather than the singular act of advertising (things like shelf placement, email coupons, sales timing and amounts, etc)

It repeatedly amazes me how large businesses can be so savvy as to the subtleties and nuance of advertising or lobbying legislation but miss something as simple as 'gee, if we treat our customers/employees decently we will get better results'.

Funsad reality; the average human is as productive, long term, with a 30-hour work week as with a 40-hour. Because they are less tired they create the same amount of productivity in less time. But people can also push and increase their productivity via a 40-hour week -short term- and so companies decided 'oh hey, since humans can do this for two weeks, clearly they can do it for twenty years'.


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 Overread wrote:
Homeopathy has evolved since its early days. Those in charge realised that the magical water cure was getting too much fire from science and sanity so they spliced it with herbal remedies. So modern Homeopathic medicine is both a mix of water-magic and herbal - which is very sad because good herbal is real medicine and thus does have real benefits that are scientifically proven. So they've brought in some legitimate along with the illegitimate which lets them keep going.

There is a term for alternative medicine that works; medicine.

Ninth I've also read that shorter working weeks and more regular weekends can also boost productivity in general.

It's likely the same as how working from home during Corona has shown many companies that it actually works and employees can and do remain as productive at home as at work; and that those who are not are often those who were a problem at work to start with (and might have managed to mask it by getting other to do work for them).


Sadly it takes a big case of being shown not just being shown studies for companies to adapt and change.