Thursday, April 10, 2008

You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake …


Human beings like to feel special, we’re all about the ‘specialness’, our car is special, our house is special, our clothes are special, even the tird in our toilet bowl looks special. Someone a lot smarter than me said that love is overestimating the difference between two people…which off course lends itself to the controversial theory that those we love are special!…Yes to steal of Chuck Palahniuks, we all want to be beautiful and unique snowflakes.…Which brings me, to the hardest part of all of this free flowing hostility, admitting to myself that in this industry, the stuff we promote…wait for it, isn’t special either…

Now yes, I did ponder nose diving from the creative department into the lobby resulting in one of those dignity depleting landings whereby the last remaining memory of you involves you lying in a pool of your own blood with one of your legs awkwardly twisted and a receptionist screaming ‘somebody help’, a plea that holds relevance only to the cleaning squad responsible for mopping you up and picking up your left finger which was severed by the second floor railing…
But, having grown up in suburbs of Greece and gone to a school in a place where parents donate buildings to ensure their kids get away with crapping in the teachers pigeon hole, has made me a strong person capable of dealing with immalleable truths…

No one could contest the fact that working in this industry is getting tougher by the day. Once upon a time, our jobs was made easy by difference which ,for successful brands came in the form of a unique selling proposition or competitive advantage. Today replication is everywhere, redundancy is ubiquitous, everything works, clothes get white, coke tastes like coke and what maybe unfortunate for the aspiring gold-digger… condoms no longer rip…all products are simply excellent. This conjures up images of the precarious day I scored a 83 in algebra and was over the moon until I found out the class average was a 96. Excellence has become a table stake without which you’re mostly likely filing for bankruptcy, operating in a monopoly or living in a country where the guy in the picture is from…

Miss you Cherm