AFRO-NETS> Global corporations revive some dark memories

[Christian Labadie <prevges-moderators@ml.free.fr>]

Global corporations revive some dark memories
---------------------------------------------

Translated under fair use from Focus.de 

Lebensversicherer verlangen von Homosexuellen Aids-Test
http://de.news.yahoo.com/021103/12/31rbb.html

Sunday 3 November 2002, 09:42 
Life insurers require homosexual AIDS test 

Munich (AP) -- According to report of [the German news magazine] "Fo-
cus" several [German] life insurances require an AIDS test from homo-
sexuals before conclusion of a contract. The news magazine Focus has 
copy of letters of the insurers "R+V" and "Cosmos", in which the 
firms require the test because male clients wanted to register a man 
as their beneficiary in case of death.

The [life-insurance] firms say they are dependent on this "risk se-
lection", quoted "Focus" from the letters of the R+V insurer. Accord-
ing to statistics "unfortunately still more homosexual persons" in-
fect themselves than heterosexuals. Thus increase the death risk.

The [German] Federal Institution for supervision of financial service 
criticized the procedure of the insurers: Such a selection can be 
discriminating, said lawyer Sabine according to "Focus". In principle 
it is usual to ask for an AIDS test in case of higher insured sums. 
However to link the HIV test with the sexual inclinations of the con-
tracting client is regarded by the authority as "legaly abusive".


--
Comments by Christian Labadie

In a world where corporate management is mighty, it is our duty to 
decifer and to scrutinise the mentality of management.

Indeed, two years ago, in the mid of the globalisation euphoria, a 
speaker for a German but globalisation-friendly pharmaceutical firm 
said on the German news about children born with HIV in Botswana that 
they were born in the wrong country, in a country that could not af-
ford the proper medicines. Sixth month later, and partly thanks to 
the on-going world-wide battle of homosexuals to effectively combat 
the stigma of HIV/AIDS, especially Act-Up since the early 80's, the 
Pretoria case brought back some wisdom in global pharmaceutical 
firms. At least their speakers stopped passing comments such as "be-
ing born in the wrong place".

What the German speaker was reviving has a name: it's called geopoli-
tics. As the Swiss scholar Claude Raffestin demonstrated, geopolitics 
is a mentality that comes from the consequences of the abolition of 
slavery in the early XIXth century. Claude Raffestin elegantly de-
scribed how French, English, Swedish and German intellectuals have 
constructed a mentality framework that replaced that of slavery. This 
mentality has intimate relations with the reasoning that lead to the 
Holocaust, again this is carefully demonstrated by Claude Raffestin.

Among the other victims of this mentality were the homosexuals. They 
were brutally tortured in a camp in Elsace between 1941 and 1944: the 
Struthof. The younger homosexuals had to witness how older homosexu-
als died of cold, hunger and diseases. Still today, German homosexu-
als born in Germany before or during World War II, are stigmatised, 
excluded, without retirement, sometimes even expatriated.

The next article reproduced from the Guardian show how certain corpo-
rate events are not just incidental.

Christian Labadie
mailto:prevges-moderators@ml.free.fr
http://citation.thread.free.fr/prevges



--
Reproduced under fair use from the Guardian Unlimited:

Comment 

Slipshod marketing behind the Zyklon blunder 

The sophisticated checks deployed by modern marketers should have 
prevented a shoe being given the same name as that of the Nazis' mur-
derous gas, says Rosie Walford 

Friday September 6, 2002 

If international sensitivity were always a priority, Plopp chocolate, 
Smac detergent, Hardon Tea and Puke playing cards would not exist. 
Clairol would not have exported the Mist-stick (shit-stick) to Ger-
many, Ford would have known that Pinto said "small penis" to buyers 
in Brazil. Such howlers are entertaining remnants of a world before 
global marketing grew slick - harmless to most, just expensive mis-
takes for their manufacturers. 

But last week, a more disturbing misnomer was revealed. Jewish commu-
nity groups denounced the British sports supplier Umbro for calling a 
running shoe Zyklon, the name of the Nazis' poison gas. Umbro de-
fended itself by saying the association was "purely coincidental", 
mentioning that it has another shoe called Zypro. 

Certainly, many companies create ranges of similar names for their 
"sub- brands", and there is a trend for such names to incorporate 
Latin-sounding roots. Such linguistic associations transmit a sense 
of durability, according to current orthodoxy in the name-generating 
world. 

Corporate name-generating is far from incidental. Brand owners - or 
their advertising agencies - first articulate brands' "positioning": 
what human motivations they hope to tap into, what aspects of the 
products' functional performance they want to boast, what "personal-
ity" the brands are meant to have. Positioning determines whether a 
name should fit with others in the category, or be revolutionary, 
like "egg" among banks. 

Then deliberate creativity sets in. Specialist consultancies provoke 
groups of marketers and handpicked generalists to think laterally - 
making them examine, say, examples of elasticity in the animal world, 
discuss the artist's intentions behind a hundred paintings, or handle 
random substances blindfold. Literally thousands of words get gener-
ated: inspired answers to the brief arise from diverse choice. 

Existing words are likely to be in use or protected. So name genera-
tors generally start fooling around with abbreviation, word combin-
ing, adding colour- names, an "e" or "i" (to allude to technology), 
or suffixes and prefixes galore ("alt" for height, "pri" for first). 

But names are the handles for our personal baggage. Quite apart from 
trademark constraints, all names have associated images, cultural, 
linguistic or personal. So manufacturers normally run suitability 
checks which explore the "baggage", using projective techniques among 
groups of likely consumers. 

A surprising proportion of brand owners check international suitabil-
ity informally, emailing candidate names to colleagues in every mar-
ket, or where their ad agency has offices. The brand-name company 
WhatIf says the informal route works well: "Real people know when a 
word sounds like slang, a new club or the street name for a drug." 

By this commonplace method, the Thailand office of the ad agency Leo 
Burnett recently alerted clients that their proposed name for a motor 
oil, phonetically, read "tight virgin". The name was dropped. 

But a big company like Umbro could easily employ formal brand-name 
analysts. In the space of a few days, overseas linguists or sociolo-
gists report on similar words, connotations and imagery, and any red 
flags - sexual, religious or political. Such services promise to un-
earth historical connotations. For example, an Irish analyst from 
Linguistic Systems condemned the proposed name TrueBlue: "An extreme 
rightwing, quasi-militaristic movement in Ireland in the 1930s was 
known as the 'Blue Shirts'. Some of its members fought for Franco in 
the Spanish civil war. In Ireland, the term 'Blueshirt' is synonymous 
with 'Fascist'. The colour blue therefore has a strong political, 
fascist connotation." 

Umbro definitely would have found out that Zyklon was a "dangerous" 
choice, even had it only requested one analysis into British or 
American English, for less than £130. 

It is a matter of judgment and choice. PR disasters do unquantifiable 
harm, but renaming costs dear; equally, running dual branding for the 
same product is inefficient - hence "harmonisation" of Marathon to 
Snickers, Jif to Cif worldwide. 

Although Mistsubishi changed the Pajero ("masturbator") to Montero 
for Spanish-speaking markets, sometimes marketers knowingly allow 
names with dubious translations to persist. General Motors marketed 
the Nova ("doesn't go") unchanged. According to Business Mexico, GM 
discussed the possibility of confusion but kept the name on the 
grounds that "the word is sufficiently incorporated into the language 
as meaning 'new' - as in 'bossa nova' - that the criticism isn't 
strong". 

But Zyklon has caused serious offence. Umbro says that "the person 
who named the shoe did not realise what it meant". They clearly never 
typed "Zyklon" into Google. The first entry reads: "Methods of Exter-
mination. Gassing. Medical Experimentation. Shootings ... " Even if 
the name coincided accidentally, its connotations were unwisely ig-
nored.

--
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