Never under estimate how powerful a strong bland proposition can be if you are not striving for a thriving profitable and successful business – you have to try hard at this though and be utterly committed to the bland organisation ideal. A strong bland is critical to visionless, mediocre, average, unsure, wasteful, ponderous and declining. All a bland needs is some choice management buzz words to bring it all together and be as disappointing as a new action toy or game gizmo with no batteries on Christmas day. A strong bland should emulate the competition wherever possible, add nothing new, don’t impress your audience groups and – to really power your bland – do inconsistent shades of poorly painted magnolia bland dribbling across incoherent marketing collateral. A strong bland should leave you no option but to compete just on price, go on price drop, go in cheap and cheaper and be proud of it. Got margin? Kill it, be rid of that pestilent profit filth, jump on to the exciting downward spiral and enjoy the game. A bland should always aim to devalue whenever possible, the competition bah, they are just the expensive option. A strong bland is critical staff demotivation and departmental disharmony. Don’t let them talk, think how they can contribute, don’t give them a sense of ownership, beat them and tell them to shut up, they don’t need a benchmark ideal to inspire and believe in. Your workforce need bland, to keep them in their place, create that bland desirable featureless, dusty grey luna landscape monotony at work. The last thing a successful bland needs is a motivated, dedicated workforce that wish to go the extra mile for the organisation. A strong bland should drive customers away, not attract them. Customers should be thankful that you are here, plus the sales team should be working harder, they need to pull their socks up and if they can’t achieve there targets without any tools, then they are obviously not true salesmen. A strong bland does not look to the future or see it’s space as it ever diminishes like the screen dot when you turn off an old television. A bland wishes for a slow death of static fizzing analogue irrelevance in a digital age, at best it might wake up and flicker its eyes and say: “I did not see that digital switch over coming”. A strong bland should not strive to innovate products or approach preferring to trade on its past glories and triumphs, ignoring what needs to happen today to be in the game and win, a drunk critic on the sidelines, neither slept nor shaven mumbling incoherent slurred critique from a time when smoking at halftime was all the rage. A strong bland should blame the recession for everything, too hot, too cold, too wet it’s the recessions fault. A bland worth its salt should never look in the mirror or smell itself and think that aftershave might have stopped working after 20 years or the ‘Grizzly Adams’ beard might not be ‘the thing’ girls like right now. A strong bland does not do social or have anything interesting to say. Social is media of for kids, a true bland ignores change, media shifts and insists on blocking everyones PC at work, “none shall pass the black knight”. “There shall be no facing book, titter or tits during working hours” by order of the bland management. That’s right, a dedicated and experienced bland thinks that ‘they’ will say bad things about them, plus a bland does not need to engage, interact and listen to its market place. A strong bland should waste its precious marketing spend without a thought to a business case and results. A true champion of bland should spend more in the same ineffective way, do knee jerk, do panic, flying by the seat of your pants heading inevitably towards downfall and obsolescence. A strong bland does not look for opportunity, it’s a distraction from doing more of the bland, boring and same. New markets are dangerous, foreign markets are just plain madness, they won’t want bland, it’s a waste of time because they don’t speak the lingo and they will by British products because – well it’s made in Britain, won’t they?
