Financial & Travel Musings

One of the ongoing fads in marketing is to add the tag “natural” to the ingredient list.

I laugh when I see the list of “natural” ingredients on one of the packets of sweets that the kids get sometimes. It’s a list of ingredients that you’d definitely never find in nature yet it can call itself “natural”.

So too it is with the diet pills. Thus you can find natural fat burners on the shelves these days. There are some truly natural diet “products” available of course although you’d hardly want to take most of them as there’s quite a tendency for them to give you the runs. Not so the natural fat burners to be fair but, as with all diet pills, you need to check that this is the dieting action that you need and that the side-effects don’t outweigh the benefits.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Just because you can do something doesn’t mean that you should do it.

Until recently it was quite expensive to personalise products but as we’ve all seen there’s a massively growing market in t-shirts while you wait and so on. Now it does seem to make sense to have personalizable coffee mugs and perhaps pens, the range of items that you can personalise these days does seem to be getting out of hand. Do you really need to have your name embossed on  your laptop? Perhaps it makes sense for security, but what when you come to sell it?

Popularity: 1% [?]

A few years ago renaming brands so that a single product name could be used across the world was all the rage. Thus we have Snickers instead of Marathon, Starburst instead of Opal Fruits and so on.

Oddly though it seems to have passed by gateway laptops who sell as Gateway in America but until quite recently as eMachines in Europe. Quite why that should be so is something of a mystery as computers are a product that you’d expect to see marketed similarly around the world these days.

Why, of course, leaves the puzzle as to why they’re absorbing eMachines into Acer at the moment and offloading a lot of eMachines at bargain basement prices.

Popularity: 1% [?]