Tag Archives: marketing

Where Does All the Time Go?

I’ve watched TV, napped, answered quiz questions, read a poetry magazine, eaten massive plate of vegetables, left eBay feedback, read and replied to comments and suddenly it’s late. And I still have a post to write.

I really don’t know what happens to the time. It’s probably something to do with TV – I seem to be able to spend a couple fo hors watching without really noticing the passage of time. Then there’s the internet browsing. I rarely notice it, but I’m fairly sure that I spend too much time doing it. Sometimes it has a purpose, but often I just realise I’ve drifted off subject. This after noon at work I was researching a pilot who was injured in 1917, and somehow drifted on to TV personality Fearne Cotton. She’s a distant relative of the band leader Billy Cotton. Billy Cotton was a pilot in the Great War. However, there must have been several stops along the way of my journey of discovery, none of which were useful to the job in and and few of which I can remember.

We are having a new set of coin designs to celebrate the changing of the monarch. We have some on order but there is an eight week wait for delivery. They are going to release them for circulation about that time too, though I’m told one has already been seen. The video shows them producing proof coins. The ones fro circulation are produced a lot faster and you wouldn’t want to get your fingers anywhere near the machinery.

This may get people interested in coins again. I’m sure the Royal Mint is hoping so because it makes a lot of its money from sets for collectors rather than just making loose change for the nation.

British West Africa 1/10th of a Penny

Header picture is some of the Alphabet design 10p coins they made – a real damp squib in marketing terms. They didn’t make enough and they didn’t develop the series. They actually ran an advertising campaign when they had already ensured, through low production and tightly controlled distribution, that there was no stock to sell. If a shop assistant can spot the faults you’d think highly paid marketing executives could do the same.

The New Year Looms

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I’m just starting to get used to the holiday. It takes a few days to get Christmas over and relax. Unfortunately we start again next week, though in my case it’s probably only a day and a half. Wednesday and Friday are the target days though I may do more if we have a flood of parcels to pack. Julia is back to work on Thursday and that will be it for another year. The days will be longer by then – 12 minutes longer in fact, and progressing, by that time, at two minutes a day. By the end of the month it will be 3-4 minutes a day and things really get moving. However, I won’t get too enthusiastic just yet as it’s still a long way to Spring.

It’s a sad time of year because it reminds me that I can no longer walk amongst the spring flowers without a lot more planning and equipment than I used to need. Snow drops, crocuses (my favourite spring flower), daffodil, bluebell, tulip . . .

Crocus

The RHS has Lily of the Valley as Number 20 on their list of spring flowers. To me, even the very name is like a cold hand round the heart. It’s the scent of drawer liners and ancient aunts and, even today we end up with it in the shop when widows bring in stamp collections that have been stored in wardrobes. We use the mint condition stamps to stick on envelopes and there is little worse than licking a stamp that smells of Lily of the Valley.

I see irises are listed as spring flowers, with a flowering season starting in January. I vaguely know that they are earlier than I think, but always mentally pigeonhole them as May onwards. hat’s despite the pictures I am going to use, which clearly shows them being earlier. The mind plays tricks on us all, though not as cruel as the one that makes me think I am 19 and slim. That’s why I prefer internet shopping – no shop windows to reflect the dreadful truth.

For lunch, we will be having turkey sandwiches with mayonnaise and redcurrant jelly. If I get my act together we may have stuffing too, but it will involve cooking more as someone, and I will point no fingers here, didn’t cook enough stuffing when she did the Christmas Dinner. That never happens when it’s my turn to cook it.

Daffodils in the Mencap Garden

We have a number of taste sensations coming up for the rest of the month – Julia bought me Jeyes’s sauce for Christmas. It’s a poor choice of name in my mind, as Jeyes is the manufacturer of excellent disinfectant ((Jeyes Fluid), not the product of Philadelphus Jeyes of Earls Barton. According to Wikipedia James Jeyes, the disinfectant man, was the son of Philadelphus Jeyes the sauce man (who used to work for Perrin of Lea & Perrins. That’s still no excuse for launching a dark brown sauce that has the name of a dark brown disinfectant. It’s about on a par with the French firm that makes Pschitt, which is never going to sell well in the English-speaking world. To be fair, it was launched before the concept of eurobranding took hold.

However, you won’t believe which condiment Number One Son bought me for Christmas . . .

Sorry about the woeful selection of Spring flower photos – I know I have better ones, I just can’t find them.

Snowdrops, though I expect you knew that

Waterloo Teeth

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False teeth, as I recall, date back to the time of the Etruscans. I’m not very clued up on the Etruscans. They were in Italy before the Romans and they made false teeth and pottery. That is all I know about them. Fortunately, a quick look on the internet and moments later I can also tell you that they seem to have been competent sculptors in stone and bronze and that they are linked to the modern day Cornish population by DNA. They fought a war against the Romans, but eventually ended up being absorbed by Rome.

After the Etruscans there seem to be no more false teeth until the 1700s. The spread of sugar started a decline in dental health and though it’s possible to use many things for making dentures, human teeth are very convenient. Though it’s a widely used term, many Waterloo teeth predate the battle (there is a record of George Washington’s dentist importing barrels of teeth from other battlefields as early as 1805) and many came from grave robbery or the mouths of hanged men. Even in 1815 marketing would seem to be a feature. It seems strange now that anyone would want teeth from a corpse, but they were the best sort of false teeth and if you want to eat you do what you have to.

George Washington is widely known as a wearer of dentures, but they were not made from wood, despite being mentioned so often. You can read more about Washington and his teeth here.

The market price crashed in the 1850s as teeth from the Crimean War came onto the market in great numbers, and the export trade was reversed in the 1860s when the Americans became great producers of dead men’s teeth. That would make a great thesis for a PhD – The Effects of Warfare on the Dentures of Europe.

Fortunately, the development of Vulcanite in the mid-nineteenth century gave denture makers an alternative material, and the use of Waterloo teeth fell out of fashion.

I’m going to use another Robin picture, as a picture of teeth isn’t a great advert for a blog. The one I selected is the one that found its way into the garden Centre tea room a few years ago while I was eating scones with my sister.

Day 60

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Day 60. Also known, in more traditional terms, as 1st March. The first day of meteorological spring, Pancake Day and St David’s Day. It’s also National Barista Day and National Pig Day. If we were still on the farm I’d be all over National Pig Day, starting with a eulogy to the magnificent animal and following up with a bacon sandwich. Baristas, I’m not so bothered about. If you need a national day for people who make drinks with hot water why not have a National Tea Lady Day, or National Quercus Day – I can handle a kettle well enough to produce hot drinks. It’s hardly an unusual skill. As I didn’t even know what a barista was until a couple of years ago, I really don’t see why they need a day to themselves. It seems, after further digging, that it is a day started by a manufacturer of almond milk, another modern fad we can do without. If you can’t deal with milk, take it black.

It is also National Cornish Pasty Week and this is where the concept come undone quite badly. Cornish pasties are, it seems made with “shortbread crust or puff pastry”. In addition to this they are obviously written about by people who know bugger all about pasties. However, isn’t that the story of the internet and the content writers and influencers who inhabit it? It’s “shortcrust” pastry. Idiots. However, I’m ranting about the proliferation of national days and weeks, not about the half-witted population of the internet underbelly.

You can read the list for yourself here. There are some days that are more important than others but they are mainly trivial and set up recently by people wanting to push a cause or make money. In general, unless they include sugar or bacon, I don’t have much time for national anything days.

However, I can’t allow the day to pass without letting all my wonderful, intelligent and discerning readers know how important they are in my life. Even Charliecountryboy. Yes, it’s World Compliments Day.

Word, words, words…

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I’ve just been doing my online grocery shop. We didn’t have a delivery lasy week as we were trying to use up some of the stuff we still have. You can soon build up a surplus if you order the minimum amount each week. We have, for instance, five peppers, which is more than enough for the coming week. That’s what happens when you order automatically each week and don’t plan your menus properly.

I noticed something new on the ASDA site today – plant-based coleslaw. Now, I know I’m not well up on modern terminology, but plant-based coleslaw”? It’s made, as I recall, from cabbage and carrots and mayonnaise. There are probably more complicated versions, but when I can be bothered to make it, that’s how I do it. Cabbage and carrot make up 95% of the recipe. I use spring onions, apples and sultanas depending on what is to hand. They, last time I looked, were all plants or from plants. You could eat it with bacon and there would still be enough plants in there to justify the description “plant-based”.

As with so many modern expressions, they are using it to cover something else up. In this case, I presume they have taken the eggs out but calling it “vegan” doesn’t portray a particularly cheery image. And “we are happy to use small foreign children as slave labour but don’t want to be cruel to British chickens” doesn’t quite have the right tone either.

So, as ever, we bend the language to the point of being inaccurate, and almost meaningless, in the pursuit of marketing. And marketing, as we all know, is not much different to lying, apart from a better defined career path. If you lie outside the marketing industry you may well become Prime Minister, as we have seen recently, but there are no guarantees.

For the featured photo I have used a picture of plant-based wheat.

A Few More Coins

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As the header picture show, I can’t always prevent myself using unsuitable camera effects. Sometimes I get bored and that’s what happens. I also did a listing for some Elvis Presley commemorative coins a couple of days ago, and the first draft included text to the effect that the experience had left me all shook up and that even hours later I found it was always on my mind. You’d have to have a wooden heart not to feel some emotion at the sight of all those coins being disfigured by cheap stickers with pictures of Elvis on them. The trouble is that most American coins are quite distinctive, and reasonably well made, so they aren’t improved by adding pictures. Nor is Elvis improved when you see the outline of a Walking Liberty, JFK or George Washington underneath, making strange shadows. Look at them and tell me you don’t think the man behind them is the devil in disguise. They make my pink neon picture look quite artistic.

Can you see what I mean- it covers the coin design and does Elvis no favours.

I’ve decided that no depths of taste are too low for the marketing departments of he coin marketing companies, and this probably applies to executives of Elvis Presley Enterprises too.

The next two are pictures of a Tennessee State Quarter from two different angles – one showing the Elvis picture and one showing the George Washington profile. It’s lightly

State Quarter with Elvis picture

Same coin, different angle.

The saving grace of the Tennessee State Quarter is that it does feature musical heritage on the reverse, celebrating the sate’s many links to music, which include Elvis.

Reverse of the Tennessee State Quarter

And finally, an example of what happens if you apply a grey filter to a neon pink coin. Things are not always as bad as they seem.

George II, but this time in grey.

Trinkets of Deceit

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“Do not put your faith in such trinkets of deceit!”

Dracula – Bram Stoker

I think I have covered my youthful ambition to be a history teacher before. I may even have admitted that I really wanted to be a University lecturer but was trying not to show off. As I sit here, surrounded by chaos, I reflect that if I had become a lecturer, this would be a perfectly acceptable way to organise my workspace.

I think it’s high time that someone wrote a book on marketing and the Nazi party. This thought first came to mind when I saw a young man strutting up and down in a military collectors’ shop admiring his reflection in a display case as he held a Nazi dagger at his hip.

This was, to be accurate, my third thought. The first was that I’d like to slap some sense into him and the second was that he needed a psychiatrist.

The Romans knew a bit about pageantry and psychology, with their Triumphs and circuses. Napoleon knew some too – “You call these medals and ribbons baubles; well it is with such baubles that men are led.”

The Nazis, with their reliance on mythology, medals and regalia, were just treading an old path, but they did it well. The rest, as they say, is history.

I looked a long time to find a balanced article about it, because people tend to have strong views on the Nazis. It’s tricky, but the lesson I draw from it is that the heraldry of the Nazi party still draws people in.

It’s interesting to draw a parallel between the building of the Nazi Party and the modern marketing industry, and how the techniques of the modern industry were foreshadowed by the Nazis. We’ve had books on leadership that purport to be written by Attila the Hun, Henry V and Jean-Luc Picard, how about marketing book written in the character of Josef Goebbels? If you can make that popular, you really would be performing marketing at a high level.

Remember, when thinking about the Nazis that Milgram’s experiments proved that the German’s weren’t the only people who would follow orders even though it caused great distress to others The Stanford Prison Experiments not only showed that groups would band together, but pointed the way to later events.

We are not the civilised people that we like to think we are. In fact, when you look at modern politics we may actually be in a worse position as our minds are poisoned by a bombardment of false news.

Just one more example before I go. In 1919 the Allied Powers imposed a damaging and humiliating peace settlement on Germany and the Central Powers. This gave the Germans something to unite against. Alex Ferguson, in making Manchester United one of the most successful teams in British football history, used the same technique. He also used the technique of refusing to speak to the Press because they were all against him.

Does that sound familiar?

The Flying Scotsman

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I spent a lot of the day loading a set of Flying Scotsman medallions. They are interesting things – five in silver and one in 9 carat gold. Technically they are three sets, but we’ve put them all together to get them all away at the same time.

The six medallions

The pads in the box are actually black but the camera sometimes does strange things. And the boxes are square.

The story of the Flying Scotsman is full of interest, with World Records, grand obsessions and a host of sub-plots. If you follow the link in the first line you will get a good idea of the adventures it has had.

A piece of Flying Scotsman in the middle of a silver medallion – if you read what was replaced in the pre-2016 refit you will appreciate how many spare bits they had.

The gold medal is a very pleasant medal, though it does lack a piece of the original train. A few months ago we had some silver coins with pieces of copper from HMS Victory. It’s not a new idea, somewhere in the house I have a medal cast from the lead of Selby Abbey roof. After the 1906 fire they made the medallions and sold them in aid of the rebuilding. (Readers from the USA may be interested to note the picture of the Washington family coat of arms if they follow this link).

You can also learn a lot about marketing if you study the way these things are sold.

Sir Nigel Gresley

Flying Scotsman in current configuration

It was an interesting afternoon. I was tempted to write more about it on eBay, but I’m paid to sell, not to write. It’s here if you want to read more.

A Tale of Two Burgers

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On Monday, after working half a day, I took Julia to lunch at Harvester. That’s the sort of man I am – tight, unromantic and practical. You get free salad at Harvester, which appeals to my frugal side, and allows me to pretend I’m being healthy.

Julia had the Spicy Sea Bass with Prawns, which looked as good as it sounded. Unfortunately it’s fish and as such it’s just nicely presented cotton wool with overtones of slime and bones. As you may guess, I’m not a fish fan, unless it’s in a nice crispy batter or neatly sliced into finger-sized pieces.

Despite my views, she enjoyed it and tells me it was delicious, well-cooked and full of flavour.

I had the classic burger. They refer to it as a “craft” burger. I’m not sure why, because it’s just a burger. It looks like “craft” has migrated from craftsmen, to craft beers to relatively ordinary food. What next, craft sandwiches? To add to the weight of marketing verbiage, the “craft” burger is served in a toasted brioche bun.

I’m not greatly in favour of toasted brioche buns. I don’t really like the shiny brown look of them and though they are better than the normal flaccid “burger bun” with quick release sesame seeds I don’t think they’re much to brag about.

Add a dryish burger and though it was good it wasn’t quite as good as the hype and I was reminded of my old school reports – “could do better”.

Part 2 follows later.

(And yes, it would be good to have a photo, but I forgot. Sorry.)

RIP 8,715 trees

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We’ve just had a letter from our electricity supplier telling us how we could have saved money by signing up to a fixed-price deal or paying by monthly direct debit. It’s very kind of them to go to the trouble of doing this, though there is, of course, a suspicion at the back of my mind, that the letter isn’t really for our benefit.

A thought crosses my mind at this point. If they send one letter a year to their 33 million customers (I take this figure from Eon’s Wikipedia entry) and if each letter costs 50p (for ease of calculation) that costs £16.5 million. Sounds like a lot of money. They could do a lot with that money.

But…

From 2006-10 their sponsorship of the FA Cup (including the Women’s and Youth Cups) cost them £40 million. They spent money on other sports-related sponsorship too, but that’s the only one that has a figure attached on Wiki.

The question is, did this make them any money? I don’t know about you but “What sports do they sponsor?” isn’t top of my list when selecting an energy supplier.

Similarly, they spent around £28 million on supporting the Museum next to their corporate HQ over the years 1998 – 2014.

Again, it wouldn’t really influence me in my choice of supplier. I might feel good about indirectly supporting a museum, but it would come a long way after price and green credentials.

It may be that sponsorship pays its way. It may be that sponsorship is just a massive vanity project.

The only thing I do know for sure is that if they sent out one less letter per customer per year they could probably pay for all the sponsorship, and save 8,715 trees a year.

Woodland – Rufford Park

(I calculated the tree usage from this website).

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Life after the Care Farm