Those Awful Advertising Slogans - No. 17 - Toyota

 Toyota, the largest manufacturer of motor vehicles in the world, is also, not surprisingly, a major sponsor of the Olympic and Paralympic Games that have been held this summer in Tokyo. I have no issues with Toyota supporting the games and in particular putting their hefty marketing muscle behind the assistance of athletes needing help.

What I do resent is the slogan that this massive business has adopted to showcase their efforts. It only came to my attention recently, when a large poster appeared in beautiful Ruislip, but apparently it has been running since 2018. Here is one of the many examples of the use of the slogan.

 I am certainly not the first who has looked at these three words and pondered, deeply, about why it is that marketing people are so offensive. A cursory glance on Google showed that a frequent search on Toyota and Impossible is "What does Start Your Impossible mean?" and the answer, according to Google, is

"Start your impossible" is a catchphrase that Toyota made up and it means to "start making your impossible dreams possible.

Good. I am not alone. I really cherish that phrase "made up". They just knocked it out in their shed, as it were.

Let us not waste too much space dissecting the mentality of people who try to turn adjectives into nouns. They know what they're doing.  Presumably it goes down well with the kids, or something, Why they couldn't use "Start your impossible dream" I don't know. It's a helluva lot better as a slogan, and it rules out the alternatives that we at Ramblings naturally came up with when considering how the slogan should have been crafted:

• Start your impossible ambition to expunge admen from decent society
• Start your impossible attempt to make vehicle manufacturers take direct responsibility for poisoning us with diesel emissions
• Start your impossible campaign to make it impossible* to drive a car with the windows open whilst playing music loudly.
  

I suppose the guys in Tokyo really think they are doing cutting-edge, innovative marketing. But they are not. Like all car companies, they are inherently conservative and terrified of doing anything really new. The three-word strap-line is so firmly established in the ad world that it seems nothing can shift it and, if what they really want to say is several words longer, then they just cut out the extra words and leave it up to us to guess.

*Sorry about the repeat of "impossible". I couldn't think of an alternative and it's getting late

Taking the pss

 Many years ago I took out a personal pension through a well-known institution in the market - Standard Life. In 2006 it floated on the London Stock Exchange and I subscribed for a few shares. I have held them ever since.

Standard Life merged with another institution, Aberdeen Asset Management in 2017 and the new entity traded as Standard Life Aberdeen. 

This year the old names have been jettisoned. The business is now known as abrdn. Yes, you saw it right. Out goes the old fuddy-duddy capital letter at the start of the name. Out go any unnecessary vowels. We must now think of this organisation as something both ungrammatical and unpronounceable.

Here is how the business news portal Bloomberg reported the change, in April this year:

Standard Life Aberdeen Plc decided it was the vowels holding it back.

One of the U.K.’s largest asset managers is changing its name to Abrdn -- pronounced “Aberdeen” -- in a bid to attract a younger client base by mimicking the naming approach of some startups. In a major rebrand complete with its own video, the company created by a 2017 mega-merger announced the new name Monday.

The rebranding is “modern, dynamic and, most importantly, engaging,” Chief Executive Officer Stephen Bird said in a statement. “Our new name reflects the clarity of focus that the leadership team are bringing to the business.”

 Incidentally Bloomberg got it wrong. It really is abrdn, not Abrdn. I know because they wrote to me today to tell me they have changed their share registrar.

So "abrdn" is pronounced "Aberdeen". Well, that clears that up.Yes, those pointless and frankly rather irritating number of e's in the name made life so complicated. Now we can phone them up and not waste all that time and instead pack in a lot more investing.

I am however bothered that abrdn still employs a Chief Executive Officer. How old-fashioned. That's never going to cut it with today's youth. Something far more dynamic, with greater clarity of focus, is surely demanded. How about Top Dude? Head Honcho? The Boss Groover? And what's with this "Stephen" nonsense? None of the modern young client base will stand for that. Stv. That's all the letters a modern, thrusting and dynamic Groover needs for that all-important engaging with the kids. Stv Brd. Rolls off the tongue, does it not? Pronounced "Dickhead".

 

Back on the Met

 I last took a London Underground train in the first week of March, 2020. The growing fears about the Covid epidemic convinced me to stay away, well before the first official lockdown. Today I finally ventured back with a short trip on the Metropolitan to Finchley Road (and a return via the Jubilee from Swiss Cottage).

It felt good to be riding the rails again and somewhat disconcerting, too. Most of my fellow passengers wore masks but several hold-outs sat defiantly with mouths and noses exposed. Coming back, I was struck by the number who propped a bag in the adjacent seat, as if to ward off those thinking of sitting next to them. The technique here is to avoid all eye contact with anyone who looks wistfully at the seat on the grounds that most people are far too polite to ask for the bag to be put where it belongs, on the floor.

The journeys themselves were not remarkable, although the Met on the return was held several times for a few minutes; we were very close behind another and they might have been "regulating" the system as they used to call it. There were no announcements about covid precautions, no station assistants were to be seen and, of course, nobody was enforcing the wearing of masks although this is a legal requirement under London Transport's own by-laws. We used to get loads of announcements about not smoking, standing behind yellow lines, keeping one's property with one, all that sort of thing, so it was strange to have a peaceful journey.

I also noticed that some of the signals on the Chiltern Line northbound out of Harrow were covered up. These tracks are also used by some Met services (indeed, a fast Chesham was due in according to my tube app) so it seems that the Automatic Train Operating system, promised for God-knows how many years, may be in force on that section. This system has been running well on the Jubilee for quite a while and it should mean that Mets can go faster. It has been a long time since I used to get hurled around in the swaying carriage of the old A stock belting up from Neasden at 60mph plus; it will be fun if they can push the S stock trains to their full potential over that section.

The Man on the Scooter

 The Olympic Games are well underway in Tokyo and right now cycling events are taking centre stage. Whilst most sports leave me cold, I enjoy cycling, one of the very few activities that I do myself. I find the strength, stamina and daring of Grand Tour cyclists genuinely impressive. However, the Olympics cuts out pretty well all of this in order to have nearly all of the cycling events take place in a velodrome. So there are no grinding climbs up 1 in 8 ascents, no 70kph descents round hairpin bends, no breakaways and chasedowns... just one long sequence of cyclists going as fast as possible whilst going round and round. "How can we spice this up and add something to grip the wider public?" was the burning question.¹

The answer was a race called the Keirin, introduced in 2000. The competitors follow a man on a scooter (or "keirin") who, grim-faced and unwavering, chunters round the course whilst they follow, forbidden to overtake until the final three or four laps when they are permitted to sprint for the finishing line. Naturally, in the Ramblings household, all attention is on the little man (given that there is not a lot going on behind him, other than the cyclists gradually speeding up to match his gradually speeding-up scooter). Will he ever look to left or right? Will he glance over his shoulder with a "So long, suckers" kind of expression? Will he fall off, leaving a rogue scooter careering up and down the steeply banked sides of the arena while the cyclists scramble to dodge it?

How does one get this sort of job? It requires no physical skill but a fair amount of concentration. Do the Japanese hold intensive week-long exams where the candidates, wearing loose judo-style clothing and headbands, confront each other with glaring eyes and chest-beating? Must they be able to compose, and to illustrate though beautiful calligraphy, haikus in honour of cranes soaring in the morning mist over Mount Fuji? Is there a Keirin Master who asks baffling Zen-style questions such as "If a man falls off a scooter in a deserted arena, is he enlightened or merely bruised?"

This is the only sport where a non-competitor is actively involved. You don't get girls in jodhpurs cantering on a pony ahead of the steeplechasers, casually guiding her steed over the jumps whilst calling back "Come on, it's easy". The rowers, who of course train with a coach on a bike, barking instructions through a megaphone whilst tracking them on the towpath, nonetheless are quite capable of going up and down the pool without, say, a bloke wearing sunglasses in a motor-boat and swigging champagne, going ahead of them. A young woman on very high stilts is not required to encourage the pole-vaulters, nor do frisbee-throwers dance about when the discus-throwers begin chucking things.

My final problem with the Keirin is simply its pure artificiality. Nobody can take part in this sport unless they have access to a velodrome and to one of the little men with a scooter to hand. Anyone can ride a bike but almost nobody who does so will ever participate in a Keirin - it is strictly for the elite, a spectator sport rather than an all-embracing one. Which is why I couldn't care less if they dropped it and we never heard of it again. But if they introduced Keirin jousting, where two competitors ride in opposite directions for a few laps, one higher than the other, until that last lap where they meet literally head-to-head whilst brandishing spears ...yes, that one would definitely be watchable.

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1. I assume it was a team of stupidly over-paid marketing consultants who took on this assignment. They probably drooled over the fantastic commercial possibilities of ad-breaks during the interminable laps before the actual racing began.