Nothing to do with travels or sailing, just some fun observations about the coming apocalypse.

Our modern world is covered with advertising.  It is hard to go more than a few minutes without somebody trying to sell you SOMETHING.  In some ways, marketing defines our culture.  (Even if you don’t agree, go along for the ride here, it’s fun…)

For most of the last century one of the companies that was at the pinnacle of  marketing in the western world was Procter&Gamble. With more well know brand names and advertising slogans than any other organization, their in-house marketing teams touch our lives every day as much as any other group of people alive or dead.  If the ideas from P&G have to some extent defined our culture, I now have conclusive proof that our culture has come to a final, and complete, dead end.  Why?  The marketing people at P&G have totally run out of ideas.  Proof?  I present to you Exhibit #1:  Bearglove Body Wash Front Label

First is the name.  What exactly is a “BearGlove”? Is it a glove you wear when you have some kind of interaction with a bear?  Is it something a bear wears on his paw?  And what’s with the two bears on the label?  One is roaring ferociously, the other looks lost and asleep. Does Bearglove have anything to do with soap?

So we are not not off to a good start where with the name.  But what’s in a name?  The REAL test of a marketing department’s skill and creativity is the SLOGAN!  Any product is worth nothing until it has a great SLOGAN!  That is how people remember the product.  In many ways the SLOGAN on the outside of the bottle is much more important than the product inside it.

Here is where my case for the imminent  total collapse of our cilvilization is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt.  Exhibit #2, Bearglove Body Wash, Back Label.

Here is the SLOGAN for this product, photographed right of the back of the bottle, because there is no way I could have made this up:

I could write a long critique of this amazing bit of prose (or is it free verse?), but nothing I could possibly write would be any better than a little mental exercise I’d like you, the reader, to perform.  Be forewarned, if you have a very good imagination, this might be physically painful.  Here goes:

Imagine:  Yourself as a participant in the corporate meeting where this was the BEST slogan anyone could come up with…

I apologize if that little exercise left anyone with traumatic nightmares.