I’m calling time on the corporate ‘passion’ thing.
You know, the ‘at blah, we’re not just involved in welding – we’re passionate about it’ schtick.
Since Microsoft kicked it all off with ‘your potential, our passion’ it’s become almost a self-imposed corporate mandate to regularly reassure anxious consumers that it’s not just making a product, it’s satisfying its passion.
It’s been dull for a while.
But now, with the arrival of Allinson’s Bread to the corporate passion play, it’s surely tipped over the edge.
According to their latest ad campaign and website, Allinson’s apparently have a ‘passion for brown bread.’
My question is – why?
Why do they have a passion for brown bread?
What about brown bread deserves anyone’s passion, relative to all its other more deserving recipients?
In fact, I am beginning to think that this is what’s at the root of our messed up Anglo-Saxon, workaholic culture.
We are being drip-fed the belief that the passion of our souls should be directed towards the making of brown bread, pizzas, cars, or the delivery of innovation, quality, engineering, etc, when surely it should be going towards our wives, lovers, friends, kids, local football clubs, whatever, instead?
So I feel a backlash coming on.
Any day now someone, in the minimising style of Ronseal, will have the nerve to run a corporate campaign that says ‘here at sane company, we turn up, make the product and then go home to be with the people we love’ – and consumers will punch the air in celebration of the belated acknowledgment of the truth.
After years of passion propaganda I’d now go out of my way to buy a brand of brown bread whose tagline was ‘we bake it, then go home’ – and I know I wouldn’t be alone…
