Some minor issues

In an era of abundance, self-awareness kicks in. People become sensitive for non-elementary values. Even more: they start living by it. These values become elementary, at least that’s what people think.
I’m talking about health, about environment, about spirituality. For the record, I’m not saying these values aren’t important, but I know you only care about them if you have food on your plate and don’t see your siblings get killed in some dirt war.

Anyway, we start mattering about stuff (mainly ourselves), and this is reflected in our consumption pattern. We pay more because the package states Aloe Vera or Omega 3, we prefer green things and even fair trade becomes an option.

Clever brands noticed this and started offering products that respond to this new demands. They boomed! A billion dollar market! Abundance rocks!
And again, I’m not blaming these brands. And I’m not blaming the consumers either (I’m one of them). Buying these things just makes you feel better. Cheaper than a shrink.

But I’m astonished if a see these new values become absolute and bluntly translated to any brands. Watch this (Belgian) Cola commercial.

It’s about a new product: Coca Cola Light plus. It’s Diet coke with added vitamins and magnesium. I have 2 problems with this approach:
1/ drinking coke isn’t about health. I perfectly understand de light/diet movement: it’s about enjoying good live without damaging yourself (well ..). But the plus movement is telling your consumers: “you know, it’s not only ‘not bad’ for you .. it’s GOOD for you”. As a consumer, I don’t buy this. Drinking coke isn’t about wellness. The message isn’t authentic.
2/ the commercial .. it doesn’t understand the movement. Taking care of yourself is an active decision (passively supported by the adapted products). But if you choose to go to a wellness center for example, you don’t do it because you HAVE to. You do it because you WANT to. Because it makes you feel good. In the spot these values are wiped of the table. Coke light plus .. the lazy way to wellness. Wait, it even is the payoff of the spot: “An easy way to goodness”.

In my mind coke messed up big time. I’m probably proved wrong because I’m sure the product will sell, but they’ll pay in authenticity.

An other local example: McDonalds is sponsoring a Basketball camp. I don’t understand why the organiser of the camp (Pieter Loridon & C°) is accepting the sponsorship, it’s simply the wrong message. McDonals isn’t healthy food, don’t fake it is. Again, not authentic. Not authentic for Micky-D, but most important not authentic for the basket camp.

Writing these things, I feel nagging and getting old
To be honest, I don’t care about the ethics. But I do care about the marketing. And in my mind these examples are bad marketing. And I don’t like bad marketing, I like to do things proper and effective, and now it just feels like wasting money.

Now please bring me a beer with added calcium, I need it!

How do you fight an organisation like the WTO? By pretending you’re them.
That’s exactly the way the yes men figured out.

What’s it about? Some time ago I accidentally bumped on a documentary aired on the Dutch television called The Yes Men. These guys are hosting a website called gatt.org which is more or less a copy of the WTO website. Sometimes (and that’s what they hope for) people mistake them for the real WTO and invite them as speakers and so on.
The yes men jump on these opportunities, call themselves WTO executives, but bring what’s in their mind the real thoughts of the WTO.

Example: the WTO is supposed to be a supporter of 3th world countries, global trade and economics .. but it seems they only care about the Western/rich countries. So in stead of helping people who really need it, they kind of make things worse for them.

The Yes Men is a kind of positive protest to this. A clever form of protest, and a more subtle one. But one that might really change peoples minds and hearts.

I’m not going to describe the actions they did, would lead us too for. In stead I would like to invite you to see the docu yourself. It’s on Google video! (turn of the Spanish subtitles if you wish)

Basically, what the yes men are doing is marketing. If you want to beat your opponents (which is a strong sentence in this context, but after all it’s about winning/selling/gaining .. whether it’s products or minds) there are 2 way: or you position yourself over your opponent, or you position your opponent below you.
The yes men are doing exactly this, except they do it on what one might call ethical grounds. They also do it by not presenting their opponent as inferior, they do it by expressing their opponent’s true thought. Let common sense decide!
But then again, it’s quite scary to see how people living in “the system” swallow almost everything, no questions asked.

BTW: The Yes Men is about much more then the WTO, but the documentary is centered around this topic

I just read the shocking, really shocking, news at Micromiel that David Boschmans passed away last night. David worked as a development evangelist for Microsoft, and I will remember him as a great guy, a passionate developer and evangelist, and overall a clever person.
I know he has a family, so my deepest sympathy to them and his close friends!

My god, he was only 32 or something, I can’t believe this!

On holiday, I read. At least, when i’m abroad (like last week). At home (this week) I only managed to read a few pages

But last week I read some interesting books.

(more…)

Yes, I did it! I upgraded my blog!
Major update: I changed to WordPress. I used to host on Nucleus, but since all other blogs I use are WordPress, and the platform itself is very good and scalable (huge community, lots of plugins, ..) this merge was high on my wish list.

The last couple of days I was migrating post and features, and also working on a new layout. Hope you like it. I inspired myself on a beautiful but pretty female-ish theme and pumped some testosterone in it (well ..)

I quite enjoyed getting my hand dirty in code once again. Wasn’t as fresh as it used to be, but hey I managed to do the job.

Still some work under de hood though. I’m planning to go over all previous posts and tag them appropriate. Hell over a job I think, but it will benefit my structure.
I also made sure all previous post urls, from the nucleus blog, are redirected (permanent redirect indeed). Wrote a script to help me. If you ever need this let me know.
Apart from that I moved my blog to my domain root.

So, hope you like the new design. I sure like the layout, gives me some opportunities. I’ll integrate some additional services later.
Now I’m very curious to see how technorati, google, .. handle the changes. Keep you informed.