product of year

The Product of the Year

I have a product and I don’t just want to sell it, I want it to be a smash – all-time top sales!

Or almost all-time, but then again that part of the communicational side of the campaign will simply disregard any other previous information linked to any other “hit” in this line of products.

What I do is organize a mega-campaign – publicity at its finest – promises of how cool you’ll look by using this product, lies about how healthy (physically, emotionally, intellectually or any other variant that comes to mind!) it is for you to use this product and how many of your problems will be solved by choosing this one-and-only product, slandering the competitive products, of course not directly, but in a pretty, neat, hypocritical manner, by finding flaws in their content, hyperbolizing them and hiding the fact that such flaws are more or less inherent and your very product contains them, insisting yet again on the idea of coolness, showing how your product is so cool and how other people (more than anybody has stopped to actually count), that choose this one product, are so very cool themselves and have enhanced their coolness by choosing the product in question – a tremendous publicity stunt designed to make you turn away your eyes from the content of the product and let yourself be mesmerized by its shinny outer layer.

To guarantee the undisputed success of your campaign throw in a bit of fear as to something and show how only your product can protect those that choose it from that horrid menace, fear sells so very well, eternally – and of course, if you can give a few “incentives” here and there, so that your product be the first recommended, all is solved as by divine intervention!   

Most naturally, you can present anything in such a way that people will queue for it, in a more or less civilized manner, although there is no shortage whatsoever of this product in question.

Of course this is all so very easily achievable, so much so that I bet you haven’t even realized that in the beginning it was my product we were talking about and latter it became yours!

Ha! Now there’s state of the art manipulation for you!

But still, as glamorous a product might be presented and as successful its publicity campaign might result, one thing is forever sure – no one can ever alter, for better or worse (although usually bombastic campaigns are made to sell exactly those products that do have a “glitch”), the content of the product.

It is as if I will convince you that you HAVE to buy this product X, let’s say a beverage, presenting to you all the pluses you will get from choosing this very beverage (these pluses being very carefully selected and/or invented), but somehow forgetting to tell you how very harmful this product is for your health and just why it is so damaging to drink such stuff.
Publicity will never make the drink healthy, it will only convince people to buy it - healthy or not.

This is the way it goes with campaigns – be they for objects, places, experiences, political leaders or spiritual gurus, diplomas of all sorts, basically for anything to which one can attach a price tag! And today it seems that even nothingness has its own price.

This is the way goods are sold! Sadly enough, this is the same way people are vended too.

For all those put in front of a choice – to buy or not to buy! – let us never forget that not all that glitters is gold – and this is a lesson humanity seems to repeat ad infinitum, but never manages to learn!

to buy or not to buy! to vote or not to vote! to believe or not to believe!