But, to background first - I mean to say, this tendency to create generations of kids who 'appear' out of nowhere with absolutely no background whatsoever - no culture, no history, no anything - is not only the overriding zeitgeist of the last fifty years and something which will be notably pinned to this era in the future, and which people rarely consider today, but it is also a 'new' thing in terms of what human societies have ever done over countless thousands of years. No one has ever done this kind of thing before!
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| Breakfast for you - many things in the shot, but not 'cluttered' in terms of object focus; the object is the brunch/breakfast. It's still a good shot, no extraneous things... |
The consequence of this ludicrous stupidity, is the world has bred a vast swathe of the entire world's currently living population, who are all possessed of utter social stupidity and individual arrogance - they are fed pablum, they produce rubbish, and they 'consume' repetitious stale fare on every level of thing possible that has to do with the affairs of people and society.
The reality is things that have happened before, with essentially the same people, the same families at least - are happening now, as they always have; virtually over and over again.
In the last article I talked about pictorial 'dissonance' and why I was alluding to this was simply as a means of 'seeing' how modern marketing techniques are misapplied because of restricted participation at the top ends of business enterprise, by people with too much money and not enough sound knowledge - although a lot of people come from these old families that have been in trade for centuries, they seem to have retained almost nothing from the past and what made their ancestors successful and even, in some cases, great.
If you just watch cable and satellite television and the generic corporate media, you will think the world is this multi-polar place, with certain obvious and towering hugely separated 'poles:' Hollywood, the Kardashians, America and thus its antitheses du jour now China and Russia, 'traditional' London and ergo 'Tommy Robinson,' Europe (whatever that was supposed to be anyway), the church, the state, the unwashed masses, the underclasses, the 'elite,' white people black people, poor dumb or under-educated Africans and so on.
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| Another brand owned by Valiram Group - TWG tea; a bloody silly marketing scam with every tea-marketing idea known to man in their range. But still, it's 'where the East and West meets' all the same. |
Now I myself personally have this rule about not cluttering up my own blog-pages with pictures that commit all the atrocities that I will point out now: too much noise in the frame, cluttered objects and no genuine object focus, dissonance between emotional messaging and style (what is it with 'fashion' models who look like cadavers -, who were starved to death?). And so I won't be posting examples of where the modern marketers get it all wrong.
But we can post a few examples of where they get it right, and from these examples you can draw some lessons...
High end products are mostly not authentically anymore from Europe, or America - and they are not largely owned by American companies either. Those that are American-owned make a lot of noise and that's about it.
Two thirds of the world's population is in Asia.
The Kardashians are Amenian - which means they are modern Malaysian. Didn't know that, did you. They are substantially backed by the multi multi billionaire Valiram Group, who have been around international trade since the days of the Armenian Sarkies Brothers and their stand in Asia and particularly Malaysia and Singapore. Kardashians get their lines of handbags, cosmetics, shoes, accessories - made in Malaysia, and Thailand where the quality standards are genuinely high compared to China, albeit China also has a lot of German domiciled companies from which industrial base the China-produced item has significantly advanced upwards in quality.
I have mentioned before that although ALL the on-line records say that the Bond movie 'Thunderball' was filmed in the Bahamas (which it partly was), it was also partly funded and made in Malaysia through the Shell Far East company organisation. Malaysian 'Miss World' of the day was in that and other Bond movies as one of the bikini women everywhere in the background.
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| The man in the middle is a consultant from Zurich Institute, but originally from Holland and the Dutch Shell thing - his name is de Brabant; and the up-scale styled Romanesque on the right is Hassan Choudhury, one of the AirAsia managers. |
The KLM Royal Dutch Shell group has a huge involvement all across Asia and you can see hints of it in these 'management consultants' looking into and 'advising' about the China market and Eurasia generally - leaving out our very good friend Carter Page and his 'Eurasia Energy Advisers' for a minute - if you look around you will see that all of the 'olden days' big league corporates still have a powerful foothold in Asia and hence, in produced goods and consumer merchandise that is marketed into the Western World, sometimes at the 'high end' luxury level.
Today, it is not London or even Paris to some extent, and not Germany either that you can see the money being made from - it is those Eastern European countries where there still are major craft centers, and also those fairly exotic Asian and Mid-Eastern places too - Oman, Kuwait, certainly India and Pakistan (they made the World Cup official soccer game ball, as you know).
These guys are real billionaires. They are not all-wise, and they get a lot of things badly wrong much of the time, but they also are a source of empowerment to high quality manufacturers and designers ON WHOSE PRODUCT AND/OR SKILL AND KNOW-HOW THE FOCUS OUGHT TO BE... Clean, clear, object-centered focus:
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| Owned by Czechs, I think, designed by English, and made under supervision by Italians. Absolutely first class. |
