Quarter Life Crisis
The world according to Sven-S. Porst
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All the quality money can buy¶
353 words
Germany’s car industry is huge and known world-wide. They suck in bazillions of engineers and Euros to create vehicles with more horsepowers, little gadgety motors in them and kilograms of resources used to build them. Every year they ‘improve’ their vehicles by shaving off a hundredth of a second from the time a skilled driver needs to accelerate to 100km/h and they also manage to push the top speed of their most strongly motorised vehicles higher and higher.
Some of their ‘research’ may actually bring improvements, like reducing road death-toll (around ten per day in Germany) by making their vehicles safer. But mostly the advances made seem to be cosmetic and to be aimed at making the vehicles more ‘appealing’ instead of more useful. After all, nobody is interested in a car that’s efficient and low-maintenance. Too unsexy. Of course – in the twisted sense of capitalism where receiving cash is taken as ‘being right’ – nobody would want to buy reasonable car. It’s all about the experience
– rather than getting from place to place.
As things are in such moronic industries (at least the auto-makers deserve the term ‘industry’, unlike their colleagues from the ‘services sector), they also prefer to use a lot of their customers’ money and waste it on advertising. The result are gazillions of carefully designed brochures which can look very pretty. Nice or bland photos, mingled with marketing gibberish all printed on nice papers – heavy, shiny, or both – with interesting formats, use of materials and so on. Good fun for the people making the brochures, I guess. And of course the ‘brand identity’ is so important that everything is kept in the same style with colours and fonts matching throughout campaigns so you immediately think of the right vehicle when seeing just an aspect of this – Pavlovian drooling if you want.
And then they get some moron to send out their stuff with a cover letter that exhibits all the class Arial and Times can carry. WTF? If they want to transform a transport problem into one of ‘style’, they better do that properly.
