Approve this?
I was waiting for the Mrt at City Hall when I saw this ad...
At first, you know, normal and all, glazing over, but after a while I read...
"Plain-flavoured milk"
Excuse me but wtf is plain flavoured milk? Plain is plain, flavoured is flavoured, the two are fucking mutually exclusive.
I can imagine some dumbass executives at some marketing meeting say, "OH, how shall we better market this new product?"
And some other person looks at the design and sighs, saying, "Why is the box so pink? People might mistaken this for strawberry milk."
A logical young man then quips, "But there is no picture of a strawberry, and you all know people only assume such things when they see a strawberry!"
Alas, his voice drowns in the shouts of agreement of what the previous young man said. Some of the executives take up protest boards and nominate loudly for him to be marketing president.
"We must differentiate our product from other strawberry milks!" they shout in unison, the spirit of marketing hitting everyone like an enthusiastic carton of milk.
"Silence!" says a wiser, older marketing personnel at the back, stroking his beard. "We shall hence say on the packet it is plain milk."
He gets promptly beaten up to death (protest boards helped), because it is stated in the Marketing Strategy Book 101 that no product package can ever hint that the product is inferior, and calling your product "plain"... Let's just say that old man deserved it.
Furthermore, the market has show only attention for flavoured products.
Who uses plain stuff anymore? NO ONE! Even toothpaste is flavoured nowadays, have you tried the green tea one? To further prove this point, even green tea, which is a favour by itself, has other flavours in it!
An employee at the back is silently brainstorming. He works silently, and by himself - some say he is a genius, and some say he is just trying to act like a genius by being quiet.
In any case he draws himself to his full height (1.75m) and slowly walks towards the whiteboard, writing the following:
It took 5 seconds for everyone to nudge each other, and fall into a complete stunned silence.
"Yes!" someone breaks the taut ambience. The room erupts with roars of approval once again.
Together the marketing team proposed the idea to their superiors, who proposed it to their superiors, who proposed it to more superiors, who approved the idea and had "Plain flavoured milk" printed in prominent areas.
2 days pass.
A memo was passed down from the superior superiors, who said that just "Milk" as the product's logo is not sufficient.
The team is to brainstorm and come up with a suitable adjective as a prefix to Milk, so that the product stands out.
The marketing team thought about this for a long time, coming up with ideas like "sweet", "delicious", "cow's", "yummy", "yellow-white", and none were suitable.
The logical young man was scrutinizing the product sample on the table. "Alas, this milk tastes awful at room temperature!" he says. "If only it is chilled!"
Someone shouted, "That's it! CHILLED! CHILLED MILK!"
"But, but..." the logical young man stammered. "It is not chilled..." but nobody listens.
"When we take a product photo, we will have little droplets of water on it to show it is chilled," said the marketing leader with a resolute voice, basking in his own brilliance.
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Maybe the packet will self destruct when it is no longer chilly, rendering it's description true all the time.
(Some of you may argue "chilled" may just mean 'chilled once upon a time' and not a 'cold beverage' per se. This would then make the description of "chilled milk" even more stupid than to assume this packet of milk is actually cold, because customers do not give a shit about whether the milk has once been chilled before.)
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Have you seen Macdonald's mayonnaise? On it proudly writes, "Real mayonnaise".
Has anyone tried eating fake mayonnaise before?
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