Optimism

Check out this email from genetic testing company 23andme for the most upbeat corporate email I've received recently. Scroll through to the end and see which bit stands out:

Hmm, what's that tucked away in November? Government f***s our entire business model when the FDA decides unilaterally to extend its authority to include not just medical treatments, but medical tests? And announces this by ordering us to shut down our health-based business model immediately? As part of an illegal power grab not even authorised under legislation whose very existence would give the founding fathers grave concerns about the commerce clause as currently written, or indeed about the wisdom of having a commerce clause at all?

But look, in February we were also on Jeopardy!!!

I'm trying to imagine a similarly cheery email just glossing over an equivalent corporate disaster.

Dow Chemicals Newsletter, December 1984:

What a year it's been! We've had some highs and lows, but we've managed to get through:

February: Dow Chemicals celebrates a 15 year retrospective on its most lucrative contract to date - supplying Napalm to the US government for the Vietnam War. Peace through superior firepower!

April: Dow earnestly supports President Reagan's call for an end to Chemical weapons, stressing that chemical production should be used for peaceful purposes.

July: Our famous company 4th of July BBQ proves a great success. Our illustrious COO wins second prize in the 'best potato salad' competition!

November: Plastics! Dustin Hoffman names Dow Chemicals as a motivating factor behind the famous 'Plastics' line in the movie 'The Graduate'. Plastics division reports record sales increase of 35%

December: Nasty chemical spill at Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, poisons half a million people, killing over 8000 immediately, becoming worst industrial accident in history.

December: Christmas! Dow bonuses, pre-approved before the recent unpleasantness, get paid out to all employees


Let's face it, whoever is working PR for these guys is earning their money right now.

How to make Canadian Football Awesome

When I was in Toronto about a month ago, a friend of mine who lives there told me how there's some suggestion that the Buffalo Bills NFL team may be planning to move to Toronto.

While I don't care a whit about the NFL, there's one surefire way to bolster local support immediately. If the team moves to Toronto, immediately rename them as the Toronto Loyalists.

Firstly, Canadians resolutely love clinging to anything that separates them from America, no matter how anachronistic (the Queen is one thing, but Quebec? Really? They're like a permanent grievance lobby designed to extract rents from the functioning rest of the country. De-annex them, I say). Stoking up vague anti-American sentiment, but in the politest of historical contexts, would be a surefire crowd pleaser.

Secondly, it would immediately create a super popular grudge match whenever they played the Patriots. And since the Patriots tend to be rather good, Americans would love it too because they'd still get to win, just like last time.

When this genius proposal is implemented, I expect fat royalty cheques to be forthcoming. Or a free Toronto Loyalists jersey, which I'd settle for as well.

All the world's a little peer influenced, except for thee and me...

Baaaaa.

Why do you do the things you do?

If you're ever in some trendy cocktail lounge or bar, chances are you'll see somebody drinking an Old-Fashioned. Muddle sugar with bitters (or use simple syrup and bitters), add whisky and a twist of citrus rind (wiped around the edge of the glass, and set on fire with a lighter if the place is fancy), and there you go. I'm not a drinker, but people tell me it's tasty.

Why do they drink it, as opposed to some other cocktail? 

Easy - they like the taste.

Okay, sure, but why did they try it in the first place to find out that they liked it? There's zillions of cocktails, and most people haven't tried most of them.

Probably their friend ordered them one once, or they saw someone drinking one and it looked interesting. 

Okay, so why did that friend order one?

Well now we're into the question of how social trends start. Usually we just have to throw up our hands and say 'peer effects' or 'opinion leaders' or 'fashion' or some equally unsatisfying explanation.

But in this case, we actually have a very definite answer of why you drink Old-Fashioneds.

You drink them because some time in 2006, a writer for the show Mad Men decided that Don Draper, the charismatic man's man main character in the show, would drink them as his drink of choice. The show became a hit, people started asking for them, and a heretofore archaic cocktail was suddenly restored to newfound celebrity.

I would wager that out of the people who drink them, at least 98% of them would swear on a stack of bibles that they drink them only because they like the taste, and not because of a desire to appear trendy.

And yet we reach a very stark conclusion. If that writer had decided that Don Draper would drink Mint Juleps instead, there's probably a high likelihood that you'd be drinking that right now, swearing equally that you just liked them for the taste.

The alternative is that some time around 1960, people's taste buds suddenly changed such that a previously tasty drink became unpleasant, and some time around 2007 they magically reverted back to enjoying them. Want to wager on that one?

Nobody likes to think that their personal tastes are actually fashions dictated by people whom they never met. But, more than we'd like to admit, they are.

Dropping the Mask on Invasive TV Screens

The surest sign cementing my status as a curmudgeon is my annoyance at the creeping spread of TV screens into places that didn't have them before. It was bad enough when they started introducing them into taxis - they would turn on automatically, blaring worthless nonsense at you, and you had to turn them off manually.

But the world has continued to find fresh ways to vex me, the latest being TV screens at petrol pumps. There's no way to turn them off. They're just blaring at you, volume high through tinny computer speakers. Given that the clientele of a petrol station includes nearly all of society, it would be a tough challenge for a well-meaning program director to come up with content that would be interesting to most viewers, given they're only going to be watching it for 3 minutes or so. Whatever you put is likely to be annoying to a lot of people.

Oh well, can't win, don't try! The obvious response is to just make the programming almost non-stop ads. Because that's what you want when filling up your car - a TV screen tuned totally to ads. Every now and again, some crappy 7 second football clip will be displayed, then it's back to finding out about some new snack product. The ratio of advertising to actual content is perhaps higher than any other medium I've come across. The same holds true for the world's crappiest radio station, the 'Gas Station Radio Network'. (Ugh).

This whole phenomenon reminds me of the worst websites, which automatically start playing a video clip or ad, and you have to hunt around to find what's making the noise. Except here there's no way to turn it off.

There is simply no pretense that this is something customers are meant to enjoy, unless these people are complete fools. Or I'm falling victim to the false consensus effect, which is always possible, and the world is actually full of people finding fulfillment in the Gas Station Radio Network. Hey, did you know they sell cheeseburgers here?

I can't tell which possibility is more depressing.

/rant.

The Wackiness of Hotel Pricing

As far as I can hotel, there are only two possible prices for services at a hotel:

a) 5 times market price, or

b) Free.

And that's it. Nothing is charged at market pricing, and nothing is charged at marginal cost either. It's just cross-subsidisation up the wazoo.

To make things weirder, the list of which stuff goes into the 'free' category and which stuff goes into the 'massively expensive' category seems to vary widely from hotel to hotel.

In some places, internet is free. In others, it's $15 a day. Breakfast is either complimentary, or $30. Parking is either free or $30 per night. The fitness centre is either free or $20 per day. etc.

Personally, I'd gladly trade the crappy hotel room coffee and widescreen TV (both nearly always complimentary) for free internet, but of course that option isn't on offer.

When wifi first became a thing, I was very much hoping that it would be put in the 'TV' category of 'essential services that every room gets gratis'. This battle for social norms seems to be ongoing, currently in the trench warfare stage where neither side is making any particular progress.

A lot of this seems to be just weird mental accounting and salience. Some places now charge a single, mandatory 'resort fee' to cover all the incidentals. Of course, if it's a mandatory fee, you could just add it to the cost of the room and make it all truly free. My only guess as to what's going on here is that this is a ruse to fool price comparison websites into displaying a lower price than the total value.

For all the IO models we have, sometimes it just seems like the best working model is 'companies fool around with pricing and charge as much as they think they can get away with'. This is probably a crude version of some of the IO models, like the Gabaix and Laibson model.

Pricing is weird.

Some PR advice for the PRC

If you look across the countries of the world, it is a reliable trend that any country featuring the word ‘Democratic’ in its name is both
a) A hellhole, and
b) Not at all democratic.
Think ‘The Democratic Republic of the Congo’ or ‘The German Democratic Republic’.

In many ways, this is isn’t surprising – the countries with the worst governance records and the least scruples want to cloak themselves with the veneer of respectability by claiming to be what they think polite society demands they be. This doesn’t fool anybody except the rubes, of course. But at least it indicates a clear estimate of where they think the positive brand equity lies, and it seems to be in ideas like ‘Democratic’.

Which makes China all the more puzzling.

The Chinese Communist Party has been becoming less communist ever since at least when Deng Xiaoping took over. These days, it is not meaningfully Communist at all.

In fact, if it were to rename itself ‘The Chinese Capitalist Party’, the description would probably actually be more accurate (although clearly imperfect).

But instead, they still want to keep clinging to the title ‘Communist’. This is odd to me. Maybe it just reveals my biases, but at least by my estimate of the ‘polite society’ metric, Communism has some pretty toxic brand capital – the forced labour camps, the gulags, the man-made famines, the hundred-odd million corpses piled up over the course of the 20th century. It’s not as toxic as the ‘Fasicm’ or ‘Nazi’ brands, of course (in public perception at a least, regardless of whether you think the relative ranking is deserved).  But if you just wanted to convey a sense of ‘caring about the workers and the poor’, what about ‘Socialist’ or ‘Social’? Surely that would be an improvement.It’s almost as if the Republican Party wanted to use its current policies but refer to itself as the Nazi Party.

My guess is that this is mainly due to wanting to maintain the legitimacy of the current regime by implying a historical continuity in the lineage of power (to disguise the almost 180 degree turn in some of the policies). How else do you explain the cultish devotion to images of Mao, notwithstanding that Mao would probably have a fit if he saw the current policies being implemented by the current ‘Communist’ party?

The best description to me of the current Chinese government, at least domestically, is ‘like Singapore in a number of its attitudes towards policy, but more corrupt and with a more puzzling internal party mechanism’.
But ironically, unlike the Democratic Republic of Congo, I think this current labeling does fool more people than just the rubes. I imagine it colors a fair bit of the instinctive hostility to the Chinese government in the west,  at least to extent that they continue to pay obeisance idolize a bankrupt and depraved ideology, even as they disavow it through their actions.

In other words, their actions have actually justified jettisoning what seems to me to be a disastrous linkage, but they cling to it tightly.

I guess they just don’t think that Communism is such a loathsome thing to be associated with. I’d like to think they’re totally wrong, but depressingly I’m not so sure.

The most logical software purchasers, on the other hand....

‘The Best-run businesses run SAP’

Let’s heroically assume that this statement is true.

It’s a long way from this statement to the statement they’re implying, which is that ‘The best-run businesses are well-run because they run SAP’.

It is an even larger stretch from there to the statement they actually want you to believe, namely ‘If you run SAP then you too will become one of the best-run businesses’.

It is depressing, but highly probable, that people too stupid to understand these distinctions are in charge of deciding enterprise software choices for major corporations. At a minimum, the marketing folks at SAP seem to believe that the people in charge of deciding whether to buy their products are actually fools.

End the Engagment Ring Arms Race

As they said in Wargames, the only winning move is not to play.

Over at Priceonomics, they had an excellent piece recently with the arresting title 'Diamonds Are Bulls***'.

I challenge you to read through the whole thing and come to the end asserting that diamonds aren't in fact bulls***, but are actually worthy demonstrations of love and investments of money. The reasons for the Priceonomics headline include, but are not limited to, the fact that:
-The whole thing was started by a marketing campaign in 1938 by DeBeers to get people to buy more diamonds
-We could make flawless diamonds industrially for very little money
-They lose tons of value immediately after purchase, and
-Even experts barely know exactly how to value them.

The point the article doesn't answer, of course, is how this practice persists given that most men already know, either instinctively or by reading this stuff before, that this whole thing is an outrageous con. No man is genuinely, honest-to-god happy about spending thousands of dollars on an engagement ring. They might do it because they love the woman, and know she's excited about it. But they'd sure as hell wish that the woman would be equally excited to accept by way of a substitute a really nice restaurant meal, an expensive watch, or a trip to the Bahamas. All of which in combination you could probably buy for less than a mid-level engagement ring.

So we all agree this is an egregious scam perpetrated on us by DeBeers.  These monopolist turdbags have managed to convince women and men that this is something that you have to do, Serious You Guys, to show your love for a woman. The reason this works is that marrying someone is an important decision that many men are nervous about. DeBeers has found a way to capitalise on this by creating a perception that society all agrees that we need to buy diamonds to show our love. Just like in a strip club, when you don't quite know what you need to do and are afraid to ask, you'll spend money to make the problem go away.

This problem is particularly strong because proposing to someone is something that men don't generally talk about a great deal beforehand - not to their friends, and even less so to the future bride. So they don't really know what they should be spending, and are thus ripe targets to be scammed by salesmen and their own nervousness. And it's difficult to boycott, because at the point you're proposing to someone, you're meant to be declaring your love. Proposing, while simultaneously explaining why there's no ring because that's stupid, is likely to come across somewhat awkwardly, to say the least.

The other macabre genius of the plan is that it's difficult for couples to agree ahead of time not to do it, because to plan in advance 'Oh, when I propose to you, I'll do it in this way' ruins the surprise. As a consequence, even men who are 90% sure that their fiancee doesn't care much for an expensive ring will probably err on the safe side and spend the cash anyway, just to be sure. If they could have a conversation and confirm their hunch, they'd just skip it. But they can't. So DeBeers wins again.

Frankly, I find this immensely unsatisfactory. Not only is this wasteful, zero-sum arms race spending, but it's a scam perpetrated by the most successful cartel in the history of the world.

If there's one thing I hate, it's monopolists jacking up prices. Boy, do I hate monopolists. Nothing would please me more than to see those clowns reduced to being insurance salesmen or something actually productive.

So, how do we destroy DeBeers? How do we stop the arms race?

Here's the Shylock three step plan for how, as a society, we can stop flushing money down the toilet on worthless trinkets.

Step 1. Tell all future dates, well in advance of any proposal date, that you think expensive diamonds are a crock and a fraud, and that you won't be buying one, regardless of whom you marry.

Step 2. Follow through on it.

Step 3. There is no step 3.

Step 1 is the key part. What you need to do is make the conversation about the principle of the ring in the abstract, divorced from any implication about the girl in question. In other words, make it known that this isn't about the girl you're with, it isn't because this is on your mind since you're thinking of proposing soon. No, just as a moral stand, you're refusing to enrich a price-fixing cartel to satisfy an arbitrary demand about how romance should be.

The girl may object that she likes diamonds and finds them pretty. The immediate answer is that she likes them because the DeBeers corporation decided that she should like them. Why else would society just magically start liking them all of a sudden in 1938? And if you just like sparkly things, why not a cubic zirconium? Why not an artificial diamond? What on earth is the difference, other than burning money?

More to the point, the receptiveness of the girl to this argument is a great screening mechanism. Just like women who don't pine after massive weddings, the women who don't pine after expensive engagement rings are also, on average, the ones you actually want to be marrying. A girlfriend who agrees that this whole thing is a con and are happy with a cheap ring, a fake ring, or no ring at all is, paradoxically, the one worthy of the expensive ring. But thankfully, that's not even needed!

The real question is, do you go the hardcore route and insist on no ring at all, or do you just buy a small artificial diamond for a few hundred bucks, or a cubic zirconium for ten bucks?

The answer to that depends on how tolerant the other party is, and how much you feel like contributing positive externalities. Taking a stand to not buy any engagement ring (and just having the wedding ring) is risky, but decreases ever so slightly the societal expectation of having to spend money like this. It's providing a true public good. You won't be thanked by many people, but you'll always be an honorary member in exemplary standing around this humble corner of the internet.

Buying a fake ring will cost you not much more, but is implicitly acknowledges that you're catering to the societal demand by pretending you bought an expensive ring. And pretending is all it is, because it's unlikely anyone else will be able to tell the damn difference.

I can see the argument for the second one, if only to make the fiancee's life easier so that she doesn't have to explain to everyone why there's no ring at all. That's perhaps too big an ask in the short term. But even being willing to have a small ring is an improvement. Like all social attitudes, they change slowly.

One thing is for sure. If I decided to get married, DeBeers isn't getting a red cent out of me.

This may seem like an extreme position, but frankly if you've put up with the rest of the somewhat outrageous things I say, is this one really much worse?

I don't think that was what you intended

When magazines I never subscribed to send me letters telling me that my subscription is running out, with the words 'LAST LETTER' on the front in big red letters, I find myself thinking "Is that a threat, or a promise?"

Where does value come from?

Most people have very little idea what makes one business more valuable than another.

This state of affairs tends to persist, because most businesses aren't exactly eager to reveal where their competitive advantages come from either.

My favourite example of this principle is Coca-Cola. In one of the classic bits of corporate mis-direction, Coca-Cola has managed to convince the world that the key to its success is the secret recipe for Coca-Cola, closely guarded by only a few corporate executives. Astonishing numbers of people seem to believe it.

Viewed logically, this is kind of perplexing. Not least, because there's a wikipedia entry for 'Coca-Cola Formula', which lists a number of different purported recipes to try, including one uncovered by Ira Glass on 'This American Life' which claims to be the real deal.

And yet somehow, Coca-Cola doesn't seem to have collapsed since the February 11, 2011 Ira Glass show.

What's truly amazing, though, is that Coca-Cola seems to have managed to convince it's own employees that the value of Coca-Cola is in the recipe. You know this because a number of Coke employees went to Federal prison for trying to sell the Coke secret recipe to Pepsi, back in 2006.

Really?!? In this age of modern chemical analysis? When half the ingredients are listed on the back of the bottle? When the rest could probably be pieced together by a halfway decent organic chemist? That's the thing that's keeping the company afloat?

Of course not. But the myth persists.

The easiest way to see what Coke's real advantage is is to consider the obstacles you'd face if you managed to make a cola that unambiguously tasted better than Coke, to at least 70% of Coke drinkers.

Straight off the bat you've got economies of scale. Coke is enormous and gets enormous discounts. So does Pepsi though, so perhaps we could partner up or at least get financing to grow. But your new drink has to be close to as cheap to produce as Coke in order for you to be competitive.

What else? Well, marketing is the one that probably comes to most people's minds. And truthfully this is a big one. Lots and lots of people around the world know and love Coke. That means that when they go into the supermarket, they already know they'll like it, and so they buy it. Add in fancy marketing terms for affective associations between Coke, good times, and fun parties. Why? Because advertisers have crammed this into their heads over decades.

But perhaps the most neglected is simply logistics. Coke has a crazily effective distribution network. Even if you manage to set up the most-watched viral video that gets everyone fired up about your new cola, you're going to face the problem that it's damn hard for most people to purchase it. Soft drinks tend to be bought with the aim of being consumed then and there. This means that your Amazon strategy of doing internet-only distribution ain't gonna work so flash - people don't plan most of their soft drink purchases weeks in advance. The only way you'll get sales is if you can have your soft drink there at the point that the consumer is thirsty.

And how do you do that? By having your Coke alternative available to buy in every supermarket, every deli, every liquor store, and every hamburger stand. In the whole world. Supplied constantly. So that they never run out.

Think about that. How the hell are you even going to begin doing that?

And that's why you're never going to out-compete Coke.

Setting up an equally good marketing and distribution system isn't impossible, of course. It's just very hard.

It becomes even harder if you're spending all your time trying to work out the magic soft drink formula instead. Coke is happy to let you believe that this is the source of their success, for very good reasons:

In making tactical dispositions,

the highest pitch you can attain is to conceal them;

conceal your dispositions, and you will be safe

from the prying of the subtlest spies,

from the machinations of the wisest brains.

Look at this awesome detergent I bought!!!! I'm so excited, LOL!!11!~!!

I confess to not really understanding the whole social marketing idea.

I mean, I understand how it's meant to work. Apparently we'd rather recommendations from our friends than anonymous strangers on the internet, especially since the latter may be biased.

Even this limited contention didn't quite apply to me. As long as the likely level of bias for self-serving reviews is roughly even across products (Amazon) or driven by a known function, such as a bias towards companies that advertise on the site (Yelp), I can correct for that myself. And once I can do that, I'm a big fan of the Law of Large Numbers. As N gets higher, the mean converges to the true mean (plus the bias term), and the variance shrinks. What's not to love?

Still, not everyone is a Bayesian. (I am 100% sure of this.*). Some people trust their friends' recommendations more, and I can sympathize with that viewpoint. I can definitely imagine taking a friend's advice in a discussion that came up on a product.

But the bit I stumble at is the other dimension - marketers seem to believe, rightly or wrongly, that the world is just full of people who can't wait to discuss their every purchase on some social media platform. Look, I tweeted about my new socks! Here's a facebook post about how much I love this dish sponge! I wrote an ode on GooglePlus about my camera case!

Reader, I cannot for the life of me imagine this mindset. Let's broadcast to everyone I've ever met my thoughts on every purchase! Then they'll buy the thing too, which somehow I care about.

The number of products in my life which I'm willing to evangelise about is shockingly low. I love my coffee machine. (The brand isn't important). But that's about it. Most purchases seem to fall into the category of either:
a) trivial
or
b) ostentatious
And either way I'm unlikely to post about them.

The only plausible exceptions I can imagine - holiday destinations, food, and maybe clothes.

Holiday photos everyone posts without feeling self-conscious. And this probably is a really good way to advertise tourism in Turkey.

Food, there's a whole sub-culture of people who for some strange anthropological reason need to photograph everything they eat. If they happen to eat at Wolfgang Puck's, I can see how Mr Puck might actually get advertising benefits on some reasonable scale.

Clothes, it already seems weird to be directly bragging about what you bought. But perhaps girls notice that you're wearing Jimmy Choos in that photo (guys sure won't. real guys won't even know what Jimmy Choos are, which surely proves the point).

So if these were the only people that were excited about social marketing, I could understand.

This is the facebook page for Colgate toothpaste. It has 1804 'likes'. And how many of those do you want to bet are people who work at Colgate? Or are personal friends of the social media manager at Colgate desperately trying to keep her job? Would you care to wager on the number out of those 1804 who are more than one degree removed from a direct employee of Colgate? 50, tops?

The company probably sunk a bunch of money into developing this, and I can't imagine how exactly that investment is meant to pay for itself, other than by demonstrating that Colgate in fact has a facebook page (which, if you don't, is like the corporate equivalent of being the one teenager who doesn't have a mobile phone).

By comparison, I googled 'One Hit Wonders 80s', and chose a random band I'd never heard of called 'J.J. Fad'. Their official facebook page has 2598 'likes'. Are you starting to see my point?

I can see what's in it for facebook. I can't see what's in it for most of the companies.

Maybe I'm just the wrong demographic, but it seems to me that most of facebook marketing is essentially the Tupperware parties of the modern age - adored by marketing theorists, kitsch and unimportant in practice.

*Bayesian joke. Never mind.

You Keep Using That Word. I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means

The probability of a letter from a company containing important information is significantly less when the front is marked 'Important Information Enclosed'.

I recently got one from US Bank that, as far as I can tell, was a letter to remind me that I had a credit card with the,. Thanks for the heads up!

Before and After

Weight loss products are addicted to before-and-after testimonials. They show some fat, unhappy person, then, after only 8 weeks, miraculously they've lost over 15 kg, all thanks to the Holmes Ab-tastic DVD box set! Order yours today!

For some reason, the people in the photos never seem to be holding up, say, date-stamped copies of the Wall Street Journal in the before and after photos. Even assuming it's the same person, you have no way of knowing if they lost the weight over 2 weeks or 40 weeks. Which led me to thinking about how I'd set up a bogus weight loss program. I'd find women who were planning on getting pregnant, and pay them 100 bucks to take photos of them in workout gear and record their testimonials about the Holmes Ab-tastic system (TM). Then wait 10 months until they've given birth and still have the baby-weight, and get them to look sad for a photo. 30-something women just like you, able to get in incredible shape, all thanks to Shylock '8-Pack' Holmes! And all from 8 minutes of working out, twice a week for 3 weeks! The rubes would never know the difference.

Sometimes I think I missed my calling as a marketing con-man.

Starbucks is in the Sanctimony Business

I remember when I used to enjoy Starbucks coffee cups. They had a series called 'The Way I See It', which would feature interesting quotes from various people. There was a lot of modish lefty claptrap, to be sure, but it was usually of the mild and inoffensive kind. And I would actually enjoy seeing what they had.

This was in part designed to appeal to snobbish sensibilities - look at us, identifying with educated thinkers of acceptable elite opinion! But they disguised this well, and it was generally a nice touch.

But sooner or later, they ran into the H.L. Mencken (or P.T. Barnum, depending on which website you believe) dictum that nobody ever went broke underestimating the taste of the American public. The message of sanctimony was a bit too subtle. How to jazz it up? The answer, of course, was this monstrosity:

Got that? YOU SHOULD FEEL GOOD ABOUT YOURSELF BECAUSE YOU BOUGHT THIS COFFEE, YOU ENLIGHTENED BEING!

That's right, apparently buying your $4 coffee makes you a regular Mother Theresa for the word's poor. Never mind the acres of newsprint devoted to exposing what a sham "fair trade" coffee is. (If it was purchased consensually and not taken at the point of a gun, that's fair trade enough in my opinion).

No, what is hilarious is how blatant they are in trying to make you feel puffed up and proud for your role in helping the poor. They've reached the reductio ad absurdum of anti-poverty campaigners - no need to change your behaviour, just feel good about the things you were doing anyway! Could they make it any more explicit that this campaign has absolutely nothing to do with third world coffee farmers and everything to do with how you feel about how special you are for helping out third world coffee farmers? Don't be surprised when marketers see through this sham and react to the incentives that customers are providing - helping poor people is expensive but making people feel self-righteous is cheap! Let's increase the amount of self-righteousness per unit of help to poor people!

I can't decide what is more depressing - the fact that Starbucks thinks their customers are this hollow and conceited, or that they're probably right.