Day 201

Lessons hardly learned and a short course in International Marketing.

We have all seen these home video type programs on TV.  You know the ones, a grainy video hacked out on a Hi8 where some hayseed took time out of his day of Nascar watching to video tape his dog barking and attacking his own reflection in a mirror.  One would think that after the third or forth collision with the mirror that the dumb dog would figure out the error in his ways.  Well, that is me with the Wilkinson Sword.  After weeks of self mutilation, one would think that I would use better judgment, but the frugal consumer in me says not to waste the remainder of the pack in search of a better product.  Combine this with my continuing hope that the kind folks at Wilkinson pick up my ad campaign ideas and you have a recipe for disaster if not simply a royal case of razor burn.  The return to this topic put me in mind of a recent discussion my wife and I had over a bottle of Powerade.  Having trained myself to ignore the siren song of Caffeine, I am relegated to good old fashion H2O.  Occassionally, however, I long to have a drink with some flavor.

To satiate this need, I recently picked up a bottle of red Powerade at the store.  Now one would presume that this would be a safe purchase given the seemingly international consumption of this product.  How different can it be?  Quite.  It tastes something like the urine of a Wildabeast . . . er I think . . .  not that I would know about such things.  I asked my wife if it tasted strange to her, and she agreed with a long and painfully drawn out lesson from the cosmic wasteland that is her Marketing education.  The shit this woman knows still baffles me.  I never knew anybody that actually paid attention during class.  Probably why I am the deadbeat unemployed spouse and she is the mega mogul that has the clout to move us half way around the world.  The best I can offer is the ability to ask if you want fries with that in three different languages.  I definitely married up.  The truth of the matter is, I find marketing absolutely fascinating and am still in awe of the fact that there are different formulations for a product like Powerade depending on your geographic location.

This epiphany put me in mind of a conversation I had with a French gentleman who indicated that while living in the US he tried McDonalds breakfast (they don't have it here) and found it to be an unsavory experience.  Regardless of your opinion on the quality of the food, I think most Americans would agree that the taste of an Egg McMuffin is delightful.  As though someone turned on the light in a darkened room, I began to appreciate one of the remarkable differences in our cultures.  What we find pleasing and displeasing is simply a matter of environment and slick marketing.  Processed cheese is a laughable concept here in France.  Savagery of epic proportions.  On the opposite side of the coin, most Americans would find the mold encrusted fromage that smells like a wet gym sock entirely unpleasant and inedible.  You can make points and counterpoints as to who is right and who is wrong, but the truth is neither.  It is all a matter of taste so to speak and they differ only for the sake of location and the consumer's conditioned expectations.

Peanut M and Ms for example.  They are uniform in size and composition in the US.  Not so here.  They vary in size and are not even remotely circular.  We as American's have been conditioned to expect this type of quality control.  Can't get a white egg here and nearly all eggs in the US are white.  Why is that?  Because the marketing studies show that Americans prefer for their eggs to be white, so the producers provide what the consumers will buy.  All eggs are brown here by the way, not green or anything like a crazy Doctor Seuss story.  It seems the American consumer wants uniformity and consistency while others care less for that aesthetic sensibility when it comes to their food.

I have become accustomed to a new way of life and have witnessed a different way of looking at the world.  In many ways, the comforts of what I call home seem far away and as foreign as France was so many months ago.  This reality was recently brought to my attention as we paid a small fortune for UK satellite so we can watch something other than the god aweful programming on French TV.  It didn't really help that much.  Still watching old episodes of Quantum Leap and Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, but at least they are in English now.  Nobody does Hollywood like Hollywood.  The game may be tied in all other aspects, but Americans do TV better.  Probably why we are such fat disgusting couch potatoes.  Watching TV in our country is actually an activity worth indulging in.  Everybody goes out to the park for a picnic to discuss politics with their friends here.  I am beginning to think that it isn't that they are more socially conscious . . . it's cause there ain't shit on TV.  At any rate, the UK television and most notably the advertising seemed familiar and yet foreign all at the same time.  I can't put my finger on it yet, but it is quite American and its foreign feel makes me certain that a reverse culture shock is on my horizon.

This is just a very long way of saying that throughout the world, we aren't all that different from each other.  It is just a matter of geography and marketing.  Some of it good and some of it bad, I enjoy the things done better here while appreciating those things truly done better in my own backyarrd.  I realize that I have shed myself of the narrow minded nature of my American identity only to embrace those core values that we share in common with all of mankind across the globe.  It will eventually be a return to those core values that will once again make America strong.  For the record, I don't care what color my eggs are or whether my M and Ms are round.  It all eats about the same except for that deplorable Powerade crap.

The final observation I will leave you with this evening comes from an old school saying I remember growing up.  When confronted with someone that was wearing a bit too much cologne, it would be uttered that the person smelled like a "French whore".  I myself always found this to be a flattering statement that seemed to bestow a touch of class to the "oldest profession".  It seemed romantic and I thought it might be nice to meet such a person for surely they smelled like a meadow full of flowers.  If, however, the same holds true as it does with the term French Fries, then here you would simply remark that someone wearing too much cologne/perfume smells like a plain old whore.  That doesn't evoke any romantic imagery and the smell would certainly not be of a meadow of flowers but rather of intense body odor and cigarette smoke.  It is all in the marketing.