Ate Logo Quotes

The marketing techniques were getting refined. There had been a trend away from conventional political consultants and the traditional campaign philosophy of “getting our message out to the people.” Surveys showed the people were allergic to messages and refused to listen, even if the president was on TV saying the water supply was radioactive and giant spiders were running the government. The strategy shifted from “the message” to brand recognition after it was learned that most campaigns were decided during the selection of color scheme, typeface and logo. Campaigns began aggressively headhunting at Coca-Cola and Procter & Gamble. They spent heavily on focus groups and test markets. Conference rooms full of average citizens ate potato chips and pickle spears while campaign workers auditioned fonts and swatches.

The first foundational clue Yahweh gave to humanity in these latter days, was the computer itself. The first one ever sold went for six hundred and sixty-six dollars. It was an Apple computer. It’s no accident that the company logo was an apple, with a bite taken from it. “This harkens back to the garden of Eden, when Satan tempted Eve with the forbidden fruit. The serpent told Eve that she would not die if she took a bite, but her eyes would be opened, and she would be like Yahweh, knowing good and evil. Eve took some and ate it, then gave some to Adam, who was with her. Then their eyes were opened, and they realized they were naked. This represented the fall of man.

A central thesis of both Spengler and Toynbee is that the world of late civilization was resacralized – made religious again – not because critical intelligence was persecuted and repressed, or starved of resources, but because it ended up attacking and refuting itself. Rationalism ate itself. Today, postmodernism is a hyper-cynical and skeptical critical philosophy, laying waste to all truth claims, including, arguably, its own. This can never satisfy anyone, so the world moves on to something else. It rediscovers religion. It’s more fun, if nothing else. All philosophical traditions turn on themselves and kill themselves. When Nietzsche said, “God is dead”, he might as well have said, “Philosophy is dead.” And he was arguably its leading assassin. He was Brutus plunging the dagger into Caesar. When you do that, Christ appears where Caesar once stood. It’s essential for intellectuals to make absolute truth claims. If they don’t, priests, prophets and gurus will do so, and fill the vacuum. Jordan Peterson increasingly postures as a guru proclaiming absolute truth (the Logos). But at least he’s a guru exposing the people to the great intellectual ideas of Nietzsche and Jung.

Once upon a time, there was a little girl. She lived in a town four hours away from here, in a house on a street named Daisy Lane. She had a mother and a father and her own room and a TV and sometimes could stay up late to watch movies on the weekend if she ate all her dinner. She had a cat and three best friends and wanted to work with dolphins. She had posters of them on her walls, and her computer screen saver was one, a dolphin with warm eyes and a sweet grin gleaming out at you. All her stuffed animals, except for the stupid ones her grandparents gave her, were dolphins. One day she went to the aquarium. She wore blue jeans, a white shirt (no logos, no designs), and sneakers (white, with white socks). She went with her fifth-grade class, and since it was three days before her 10th birthday, she thought her friends would let her sit by the window on the bus. They didn't. And when they got to the aquarium, there weren't any dolphins and her friends got mad because she wouldn't loan them her lip gloss; it was new, it tasted like cream soda, and she didn't want to share. She was a selfish little girl. She paid for it.

Using price as a measure of how much joy you’ll get out of a purchase can miss one of the most important lessons in business history: Premium prices are often found on branded products, and the purpose of a brand is not to signal quality. It’s to signal consistency. An important feature of life in the United States before 1850 is that most people never traveled more than a few dozen miles from their birthplace. Life was local. You ate food grown in your town. Your house was made of local lumber. Your clothes were sewn by a local seamstress. You knew the person who made them. That person was often yourself. The industrial revolution and the Civil War changed that. Millions of people and soldiers were suddenly on the move, and railroads provided a way to transfer goods farther and faster than ever before. Robert Gordon writes in his book The Rise and Fall of American Growth: “As America steadily became more urban and as real incomes rose, the share of food and clothing produced at home declined sharply…. Many American men had their first experience of canned food as Union soldiers during the Civil War.” This was one of the biggest breakthroughs in history. But it posed a problem. For the first time, consumers were disconnected from the person who made their food. For most of history, a bad product was either your own fault or could be taken up face-to-face with a local merchant. But canned food came from dozens of suppliers, none of whom customers knew or could identify. Without accountability, quality was horrendous. Harper’s Weekly wrote in 1869: “The city people are in constant danger of buying unwholesome [canned meat]; the dealers are unscrupulous, and the public uneducated.” No one knew who to trust. The William Underwood Company solved this problem. Underwood was one of dozens of canned meat suppliers. Recognizing that canned meat had a reputation for inconsistency, Underwood created a red devil logo consumers would recognize. It added a tagline: “Branded with the devil, but fit for gods.” The logo re-created the familiarity that face-to-face commerce had achieved for most of history. No matter what part of the country they were in, consumers who saw the devil logo knew they were getting a specific product made by a specific company under specific quality standards. They were happy to pay more for Underwood meat because it reduced the gamble they would otherwise take with an unknown product.