Seems like an odd time to spend so much on an ad campaign of this type. This has been a long time in coming, after all. It was in the middle of last year with little fanfare initially that Aviva group announced their formal dissolution of the Norwich Union brand.
One of the oldest names in finance in the UK, consildated and homogonised now fully into the larger whole, melted down, repackaged and resold as something new like melted down gold teeth.
Now the word is out in a big way. They have ANNOUNCED and are mounting a campaign as you see to get you to be alright with it. Those in the know (or who give a toss) (or instead those amongst us who wonder about the forces underlying these things) knew that it was coming, but I guess ad space is pretty cheap these days.
What is a brand? A brand is a maliciously inflicted disfiguring injury intended to designate ownership. Ownership is property and property is power.
And it can be so cleverly manipulated. And we fall for it, largely because we consent or we acquiese but even more crucially now because we just stupid.
Really, I cannot emphesise this enough. We, as a society, as a culture, are so cocking stupid sometimes, it beggars belief.
Case in point:- Cadbury's. 2 years ago and the company is in dire shit. Good. I say this mainly because, whilst I have not studies or scrutinsed their current longterm business model (and having indeed little desire to do so, I can guess - there isn't one. The people who ran and most likely still are running that company have not the first clue how to run a choccolate company. And the reason I feel qualified to say this is the simple fact that they have scrapped and discontinued all their interesting and vaguely different choccolate bars. Years ago. And they don't seem to see a problem with that.
Oh bra-fucking-vo. You're being squeezed out in the quality stakes by ethically sourced and ever yummy and challengingly differnt slabs by Green and Blacks (that dark choccolate with cherries still makes me cum to this day)... So no-one wants to buy a slab of Borneville anymore, that's fine, I only know of their existance by virtue of those tiny ones you get in a tin of Roses at Christmas. Add to that, you have the Government and the media cracking down on childhood obesity (I still blame the parents) and the EU toothlessly threatening to reclassify our uniquely oily, smeerish British variety of choccolate as emulsified cocca butter solid.
So what do you do? Introduce a lo-fat bar? Make the bars smaller or incorporate healthier ingredients? No. Halt production on almost every product that does not consist of standard Cadbury's choccolate poured around some form of highly processed pure sugar.
And then cause a health scare by nearly giving every kid in the country food poisoning over Easter. Nice one. "Shit, sorry, can you send all those eggs back, we think they might have salmonella in them. Oh, but please feel free to buy a couple more."
I grew up in the 80s, this shit is old hat for me. Very familiar.
All of which would not vex me in the slightest, but for what happened next. Everyone knows about the Gorilla gambit and I applaud it. It was a work of sheer sublime genius. When your brand is so utterly in tatters, you have to do something just utterly incredible to get people to take you seriously. What a sight it was, that big gorilla beating those skins, and it worked.
"Did you see that Cadbury's thing with the Gorilla??"
"Yes, that was brilliant!"
"Yeah, probably the best thing I have ever seen!"
"Yeah, me too!"
Utterly meaningless but it had a tremendous impact - like a beligerant drunk hurling his pint glass to the floor, half a second before landing his decisive first punch and laying out his victim while the rest of the room remains frozen in their collective gasp of shock and there's nothing to say when they recover because its already over and they've all born witness without ever understanding what they have seen.
Which of course is what it was meant to do, as it had nothing to do with choccolate but it had nothing to do with salmonella either.
Which brings me to the point of our absolute collective retardation. Orwell described in Animal Farm and then again in 1984 how reported truth becomes accepted truth, remembered truth before becoming history and then folklore. Some people thought that he was laying it on a bit strong, that what could be easily accomplished in the eyes of sheep or uneducated Soviet peasants could never take place in our liberal and plural democracy.
Wrong. Very wrong.
This summer, I had conversations with at least three people (and I am sorry to point this out, but they were all women) who genuinely believed that they hadn't seen a Wispa for almost 20 years. They were an element of their childhood that they grew up with, they are very nostagic for (more so that Grange Hill and great big Run DMC Addidas trainers with massive tongues worn without laces) and that they should definitely be brought back. They should be brought back, because these girls personally wanted them back and would buy loads of them once they were back.
This belief was absolute. Wispa. 80s. Not seen since around 1987.
I dispair of the human race, I really do. We are just utterly fucked. We don't deserve to live at this rate. And by the way, why is gullible written on the ceiling.
There were Wispas in the shops THREE fucking years ago!! They stopped selling them because no-one was buying them anymore! No one was buying them because some cunt at Cadburys decided that milk choccolate with bubbles in it was a bit boring and tried to copy the Minty Aero by issuing 6 or seven different varieties of Wispa to boost sales...
Wrong! You diluted your brand completely and destroyed everything that was good about it in the first place! Its milk choccolate with bubbles in it! That's all it is! Don't try and make it complicated, beacuse its not! Its just a slightly more finely bubbled version of an Aero. Just deal with the matter. They even had a Wispa with a bit of crunchie in the middle and what kind of cunt would want to eat that, for fuck's sake?
All of which would not matter so much were it not for the psychosocial history of the Cadbury's firm and it's importance in British society. John Cadbury was a Quaker and had the factory and the surrounding newtown suburb of Borneville laid down according to his firmly held beliefs. Quakers are one of the few Christian denominations I have a lot of time for, believing as they do in the principle of equality and treating all people that you meet in life or in business as your neighbour, but more specifically as friend you haven't met yet, part of a society of friends. This they place as a higher calling than preaching, prostelising or denouncing the acts of others and for that, I can even forgive them for Nixon (just about).
The Borneville factory represented a real effort towards corporate social responsibility, more than a century before most of the rest of society woke up to the fact that there is more investment that you can make to yield a profit than just mere capital. Cadbury built housing, recreation facilities and most crucially schools for his factory workers, decreeing it compulsory that all children resident in his enclave would recieve the best free education that Victorian society could provide. And they were kept out of the factory.
Names mean something. Words and syllables convey meaning and echo a herritage down the centuries like church stones. Even if most of Norwich Union's staff are headquartered in York, that's par for the course for an insurance firm, at least a UK Life Insurance firm. That's why Liverpool Victoria is in Bournemouth and Royal London in Manchester. Its a miracle that Scottish Widows is even still in Scotland. Could be worse, Zurich is in Swindon these days.
If we are stupid enought to forget that, that echo of history's call, we may well be done for.
Personally, I don't care. I just want my fucking Fuse Bar back.
Bastards.
