A simple thumb rule to weed out junk products
Why did this not occur to me earlier?
Last week I went to Staples to pick a pen. I only write on cheques nowadays and I want to keep my dying handwriting alive as much as possible and for that I want to pick a good pen.
There were rows and rows of Pens - all endorsed by Shah Rukh Khan or Katrina Kaif or Amitabh Bachan. If there was a Javed Akhtar or a Vairamathu or an Arundhati Roy ( I don't subscribe to her views but I respect her as a writer ), a Chetan Bhagat ( I am yet to read any of his novels - till then he is eligible to promote pens ) it made sense.
Mentally I worked out this equation :
(Cost of Ad money to SRK,AB,KK) - ( Manufacturing Cost of a Pen + Reasonable Profit for a pen ) = The after tax-money that is being swindled from my pocket to pay SRK,AB and KK.
That did it. I decided not to pick any pen endorsed by any of these celebrities. It made my choice quite easy.
When I looked around there was this Sachin 100 Tendulkar - promoting Kaspersky anti virus. All the Cricket heroes were promoting chips and colas - peddling things which are either not needed or are truly harmful.
This brought me to this conclusion : If a cricket celebrity or a bollywood celebrity is endorsing a product then
a) The product is junk
b) The product is not an essential thing for our survival.
c) The marketing head is a clueless bozo
I have decided to support the underdog who is not engaging a celebrity to peddle their products and outright reject the ones promoted by celebrities.
Now a new game begins in my life - to prevent my after-tax money from reaching the pockets of a SRK or an AB or a KK.
Last week I went to Staples to pick a pen. I only write on cheques nowadays and I want to keep my dying handwriting alive as much as possible and for that I want to pick a good pen.
There were rows and rows of Pens - all endorsed by Shah Rukh Khan or Katrina Kaif or Amitabh Bachan. If there was a Javed Akhtar or a Vairamathu or an Arundhati Roy ( I don't subscribe to her views but I respect her as a writer ), a Chetan Bhagat ( I am yet to read any of his novels - till then he is eligible to promote pens ) it made sense.
Mentally I worked out this equation :
(Cost of Ad money to SRK,AB,KK) - ( Manufacturing Cost of a Pen + Reasonable Profit for a pen ) = The after tax-money that is being swindled from my pocket to pay SRK,AB and KK.
That did it. I decided not to pick any pen endorsed by any of these celebrities. It made my choice quite easy.
When I looked around there was this Sachin 100 Tendulkar - promoting Kaspersky anti virus. All the Cricket heroes were promoting chips and colas - peddling things which are either not needed or are truly harmful.
This brought me to this conclusion : If a cricket celebrity or a bollywood celebrity is endorsing a product then
a) The product is junk
b) The product is not an essential thing for our survival.
c) The marketing head is a clueless bozo
I have decided to support the underdog who is not engaging a celebrity to peddle their products and outright reject the ones promoted by celebrities.
Now a new game begins in my life - to prevent my after-tax money from reaching the pockets of a SRK or an AB or a KK.
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