Great moments in marketing (cont’d)

The Chinese Communist Party fears that foreign-backed subversives want to undermine Hong Kong to create chaos in the rest of the People’s Republic and prevent the nation’s rise. Pro-democracy forces, funded by the CIA, MI6, Taiwan and the Vatican, are the prime suspects. What Beijing doesn’t realize is that the barbarians are undermining the city in a totally different way.

It started over a decade ago, when a new TV commercial appeared on Hong Kong’s airwaves. A family of four were sitting around a table in gloomy gray surroundings. They stared glumly at a depressing breakfast of plain congee before them. A voiceover underlined the almost suicide-inducing tedium of the prospect of yet another meal of juk. Then, suddenly, sunlight and colour burst into the room, a fanfare of joyous morning music rang out, and the tabletop flipped over like a big coin to reveal four bowls full of some gleaming yellow delight – and a large box of Kellogg’s cornflakes. With huge, ecstatic grins, the family ravenously started to shovel the cereal into their mouths.

It wasn’t long before a similar ad came onto the screens. This time it was a little boy cupping a bowl of plain rice in his left hand, and chopsticks in his right. He looked dejected, and the viewer was left in no doubt that, by giving him such unappetizing food, his mother was guilty of the most extreme neglect and abuse. Again, everything suddenly brightened up, as the mother began to spoon some glistening reddish topping onto the kid’s meal. The camera zoomed in to show the child smiling adoringly at the garnish: baked beans in a sickly industrial ‘tomato’ gloop, of the type canned and popularized in cuisine-hating Anglo-American cultures by Heinz.

The gastronomic sabotage continues. The grain that Samuel Johnson classified as fit only for horses and Scots has now been cynically repackaged as an accompaniment to the local staple: Quaker Oats for Rice. Not ‘Quaker Oats’, note – ‘Quaker Oats [specifically] for Rice’. Complete with a photo portraying little alien yellow bits as if they were perfectly normal in a bowl of steamed fragrant Thai jasmine. This is the real infiltration.

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7 Responses to Great moments in marketing (cont’d)

  1. I’ve always got my oats regularly in Hong Kong.

    In Wanchai, where some people hang out, I don’t point any fingers but look where my mouse rests…they do the Quick Quaker Dance. Once round the dance floor and outside for your oats.

    I only smoke after sex. Since coming to Hong Kong I’m a forty-a-day man.

    All right. The old jokes are the best. Hong Kong is a comedy hub. I’m applying to the Government for premises. Can anyone supply vastly underestimated phony building estimates? I feel we’re onto a winner.

  2. Goonerz says:

    A fellow Blackadder watcher, hurrah!

  3. Joe Blow says:

    It looks like Mo-po will soon be No-po.

  4. Real Sex Player says:

    @ Dr Dong (Oxon)

    Must be quite a hot quake if you need to smoke 2 packs afterwards

    Just don’t end up like the Scottish sheep farmer who, every time he tried to count the number of times he had sex each week, he fell asleep.

    PS : can anyone explain why Alpen muesli ‘with no added sugar’ costs about 10% more than normal Alpen ?

  5. G. Hova says:

    because instead of adding sugar they add fruit……..

  6. RSP

    The definition of a crisis in Mid-Levels:

    ” Darling, quick…we’re out of bran!”

    (One of Wally Wilde’s).

  7. Sugar is cheaper than real food. On a visit to us some years back, our young nephew complained that all our breakfast cereals were “too healthy”!

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