03.29.12
You can’t polish the turd
Pink slime and Beef Products, Inc. are on the ropes. So politicians who aren’t very popular have been recruited to burnish the image.
Public relations men gather, offering advice they know won’t work.
It’s black comedy watching the calamity unfold. And a bit reassuring, knowing this is going down to defeat unless the company can find a way to get it back into hamburger on the sly.
Excerpted:
Top elected officials in key beef-producing states Thursday toured the sole remaining plant in the country where “lean, finely textured beef” — otherwise known as “pink slime” — is manufactured. They were there to show support for the much-maligned filler and the jobs they say its production creates …
Meat industry supporters including Govs. Terry Branstad of Iowa and Rick Perry of Texas planned to tour the plant Thursday and sample the product.
“It’s the perception problem. They have this moniker now and they can’t seem to get the slime off of them,” said Marcia Horowitz, senior executive vice president at Rubenstein & Associates. Ideally, a new name would be both “accurate and non-scary,” she said, although she would shy away from using the word “beef” …
Both Horowitz and Johansson speculated that the beef industry might make a play for consumers’ heartstrings.
“Focus on jobs,” Horowitz said. The Associated Press reported that some 650 Beef Products employees found themselves out of work when the company shut down its other facilities. Since meat containing the filler is cheaper, Horowitz said a focus on affordability could also be a good strategy.
“Nostalgia is popular right now,” Johansson said. “Get back to the nostalgia of beef and how American it is.”
Nostalgia, pink slime, and “how American it is”? Certainly, it is totally American. In a very current give-us-money-for-this-crap-because-we-say-so predatory way.
Here are some possible hooks for re-invigorating the brand:
Please buy it or we’ll fire Joe the Ammonia Gas Technician.
Taking the grist out of gristle.
Perfect for the food stamps budget!
It’s this or E. coli O157:H7. Think of your children.
It’s sinful to let any of the cow go to waste. People are starving in
Korea, don’t you know?!Only socialists, commies and scientists don’t like it!
Ammonia, it’s what’s in your baby’s diaper after a day or two cooking in the pail.
Pink slime is yet more mess proving that those who manufacture odious things in America cannot be made to see them that way, even when their corporate noses are rubbed in it by mass opprobrium.