No Martian blood!

Somewhere in here I made a remark about Mars bars, and the labelling they put on their bars about 10 years ago that declared there were no transfats in their product. I thought this was pure cynical marketing and that there never had been transfats in Mars bars anyway. I thought you might as well label a pair of socks as containing no transfats. Turns out I was wrong! I know, I'm as shocked and saddened as you are by this admission. I spent about 5 minutes with Dr. Google to find out that they did do something to change their recipe to remove hydrogenated vegetable oil from it. In fact, I think they took some grief because they removed the offending material from the bars in such haste that they failed to remove it from the list of ingredients printed on the packaging.

Still....there was never apparently very much of it in their bars, so I'm sticking with the largely cynical explanation for the labelling they slapped on declaring they were now way healthier because there were no transfats in there. In fact I'm sticking with that explanation to the point that I'd bet there's research already done and filed that proves that if you stuck a label on something ordinary and unhip like Sunlight dish soap that said something idiotic like "NOW with NO Martian blood!" you'd see a spike in sales. I'm sure the people who run marketing for Sunlight would never do this because eventually they'd completely confuse and alienate their most loyal customers, people like me, people who don't expect their trusty dish cleaning product to go all campy on them. It would work, though, I bet.

So what's my point? It might be that we're all lucky that marketing is a science that takes itself seriously and so could never countenance (for good solid commercial reasons as well) behaviour that just completely mocks our collective susceptibility to their many devious and not-so-devious tricks. It might be that we should all just keep quiet about how evil marketing is, and not let on that we know their little game, because let's face it, we don't want them turning up the pressure. Considering the amount of money that's poured into research and development of effective marketing techniques (as opposed to humdrum nonsense like ending world hunger, curing cancer, and so on), I think we all need to hope that the entire marketing industry doesn't fall into the hands of some madman or self-aware giant computer. The science at his disposal, and its proven ability to manipulate us all into saying and doing and buying and voting for things we never even thought we wanted, were totally against, in fact, is terrifying. If the madman/computer decided to tell us to jump off a bridge, we'd eventually do it. The survey that we'd all be asked to complete just before taking the high dive (and which we of course would mindlessly complete) would likely reveal that the biggest  question in our minds as we plunged towards oblivion would be "What in the world made me think THIS was a good idea?!"

Don't wake the sleeping giant, I say. Just keep buying things with splashy labels on them, and don't even think about whether you need them or they're really worth this price. Think about the number of football stadiums that could be filled with Pet Rocks and Cabbage Patch Kids and He-Man dolls and Chrysler products containing fine Corinthian leather (whatever that even turns out to be), and just smile and say thank you, and mean it. Oh, and also, please keep this advice firmly in the forefront of your mind when you read my soon-to-be-released ad in this space that asks you to just send me money, ALL your money, in fact. The ad won't promise any goods or services in exchange for that money. It will just assume that because I've put colours into it and used certain magically powerful fonts and because I know you now understand the possible consequences of NOT responding, you'll just send the cash.

And no, I'm neither a giant self aware super computer nor a powerful madman. Yet.