Ridiculous Corporate Sound-Bite Sloganeering

The good one this morning was some gigantic corporate sponsor of the particular NPR program I was listening to. They had their 15 seconds to tout themselves as a sponsor, and spooled off some hollow crap about their commitment to and love of, then concluded with something like, "Committed to our consuming passion for the art of accounting!" And that was with deep feeling and emotion and real-live intensity, too! Yeah, accounting, nothing like some ledger entry to get the blood pumping, eh?

What is it about these companies and their need to encapsulate their identities in a 3-second sound bite? Is this the current endstate of Sound Bite America, where everything is reduced to something that can be spit out in five seconds or less? Yeah, most likely. No one has got the time or the energy or the attention span to listen to three or four coherent sentences which describe an organization, its structure, purpose, and philosophy. Goddamn, that might take like a minute or two. No time for that, dude, gotta watch the latest AOL/SI sports clips on my video phone on the way to Blockbuster to rent the latest video game glop for my ADD kid. No time to listen to something comprehensive; I've got other things to do in my Dodge Grand Caravan with its DVD player in the cockpit, along with the MP3 player jack and my dual phone cradles, y'know, for me and the wife.

So the end result is a boiled-down snippet of non-information that conveys spirit and impression rather than fact and information. You get an accounting company that spouts crap--however genuinely earnest they may actually be--that has "passion" and "accounting" in the same phrase. You get emotion-laden and highly evocative rhetoric that can and does elicit a powerful core, visceral reaction, but for the wrong reasons, at the wrong time. It's hollow hyperbole, designed to place and keep a message at the top of the long, long list of personal things to remember, but it's meaningless crap.

Then there's the typical hyper-mega-conglomerate slogan that has got "passion" in it. Me, I think about the tango when I hear the word "passion." I think about frenzied, breathless lovemaking in a dusty garret, sweeping the dishes off the dining room table. I think about a depth of emotion and intensity that in many ways displaces common sense and propriety. "Passion" to me is about personal emotion, maybe shared with one or two other people, and that's it. Passion is not a public emotion, nor should it be. Passion most certainly is not an attribute of a corporation. This is a misuse of the term, an intentional distortion of what passion is all about. I can't conceive of a multinational having any passion, let alone attributing to any commercial business interest the human/emotional foundations that would get me to a concept of them having passion. It just doesn't work.

I was in a major hospital a few years back, and they'd spend hundreds, probably thousands of dollars promoting their new dumbass institutional slogan. It was on gigantic banners at all of the entrances, on every piece of letterhead in the place, at the top of every announcement, and at the top of all of the announcement boards. I was wondering why they didn't announce it on the PA every 15 minutes. And their groundbreaking statement? "Doing the right things the right way for the right reasons, because it's the right thing to do." I mean, how stupid is that? What overpaid administrator thought that up, and what overpaid executive liked it enough to approve it? It's absolutely ridiculous, and despite the excellent medical care I always received there, that's how I've thought of that institution of medical care ever since then, shallow and vapid, struggling for a way to articulate what they do, instead of just doing their jobs.

Then there's the phone slogan that goes something like, "Working hard every day for you." Yeah, right, do they expect for one single minute for me to really believe that they are working for ME, for my desires and benefit? Give me a break. The corporate bottom line--and whatever this company is, they're publicly traded--is profit for the shareholders. The slogan should be, and in all realilty is: "Working hard every day to maximize company performance in order to exceed expectations and analysis in order to pass profits along to shareholders." THAT's the mission statement, so don't tell me about working so hard to help me out; that's just a lie, a plain and clear lie.

And then there are the slogans incorporating "driven." This is like the "passion" ones, with this one key word setting a tone that's supposed to impress me and make me think about how hard they do whatever they do. Take the incredibly hollow "Driven to succeed." Again, I don't consider a corporation capable of being driven, not in the sense of this usage. What I see when I hear a corporation talking about being driven is a CEO in a torn dress shirt, his tie tight around his head, with a whip and a chair, rampaging from the board room meeting with shreds of quarterly reports in his teeth, into the steno pool, screaming like an insane pirate and thrashing every single employee with whom he comes into contact, driving them mercilessly as a huge, sweaty, shaved-head Mongo wearing nothing but a tattered leather thong beats out the grinding corporate tattoo. Now that's driven.

I think about people being driven. Maybe it's an overbearing father, a pushy mom, intense peer competition, fear of failure, any number of circumstances and situations which could and do lead a person to literally be driven to do a particular thing, such as being driven to succeed. We've all seen these folks, and have worked with them, too. My experience is that they're not a lot of fun to be around. They're moving too fast, are too serious, and can't just stop and relax a bit. They're always going and going, always focused. Sure, there's merit in mission focus, but there's also a time to stop, relax, and decompress a bit. Why is it that the ones who are driven are the ones dying at age 53 from heart attacks and strokes? Is this the image that the "driven" corporations want me to conjure when they trot out their stupid corporate slogan? Probably not, but that's what they're getting.

And of course, there's all of the "forward" ones. I think Toyota's is something like "Moving you forward." Yeah, duh, Toyota, you make cars, and they primarily move forward. You're stating the obvious, which seems to me to be a little silly, given your corporate huge-ness n' all. Naturally, it's the figurative "forward" they're pushing, implying that just absolutely everything in my life will be moving forward when I align myself with Toyota and its family of products. My skin will move forward and clear up. My love life will move forward and the girlfriend will let me touch her down there. My job prospects will move forward and I can move up from scraping up the asphalt paver leavings to placing cones at the work site. Just every little thing will be better once I start moving forward.

Heard another company slogan the other day, another "forward" one, except theirs was "Moving you forward." Now, that's a bit personal, actually placing me right there in the middle of it. You're taking me and moving ME forward. What, can't I do it myself? You are so great and smart and corporately powerful and wise that you'll do it for me, instead of the two of us together? That's a bit condescending, isn't it?

And the revisionist take on the "forward" corporate slogans is that it's not a helpful slogan, but a barked imperative. Toyota isn't saying a happy, cheerful, smiling and helpful "move forward" as a figurative hand out to me, it's a forceful Japanese imperial edict to vacate my current position and move to their speed and rhythm. It's an order to get up and do something, get with the program, with their program. It implies sloth and lack of pace and vision and drive on my part, and tends to turn me off to the entire Toyota experience.

But Ignorant America loves it, just loves it all, eats it right on up like macaroni and cheez with li'l chunks of Spam and ranch dressing all over the top. These are the dumbasses who hear a slogan like "Our passion is being empowered forward to be driven to extreme success!" and they think they're hooking up with an A Number One winner, something exclusive and positive and both protective and empowering. They can't stop to think of the actual meaning of what they're hearing. They can't stop to realize that it's not about them doing something, it's about something being done to them, manipulation and message placement. Ignorant America just goes with the cool words and the Hollywood-movie-set construct of what they're being fed, all front and flash and pretty colors, but no depth whatsoever.

And this is the publicity and image and message machine that is employed by political candidates. This is where their images and slogans and definitive sound bites are created. And we wonder about how and why a dolt like George W. Bush gets to be president? Give me a break.