​​I have this thing about “medications” that don’t work. ​Call me small-minded, but the “that don’t work” part upsets me. 

So I applaud the Center for Inquiry (CFI) for suing CVS pharmacies to halt the latter’s promotion of homeopathic “remedies.” With this action, CFI takes a needful step in what promises to be a long journey—and an ugly fight—toward doing away with quackery.

What’s wrong with homeopathic “remedies”?
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• Oh, nothing much, other than every carefully controlled clinical test has proven them worthless.
• That, and the fact that when people take them instead of seeking real treatment, some stay sick, some worsen, and some die—when real medicine could have saved them.
• It should be no wonder that homeopathy doesn’t work. It’s based on the twin ludicrous claims that water has memory and that diluting a noxious substance until there’s nothing left of it has a beneficial effect.
• Many brands have been shown not to contain claimed ingredients.
• Many brands have been shown to contain unclaimed ingredients, and many of those are poisons.

For more on homeopathy, read this eye-opening Science-Based Medicine post.

The Center for Inquiry, per its website, “leads the charge on promoting science, reason, critical thinking, and humanist values.” And they do a lot more than go around suing the likes of CVS, laudable as that is. One of their programs, for instance, rescues people from execution by governments not fond of citizens who think for themselves.

I just happen to be a proud member. I urge you to check out CFI and lend your support.

​Like most business owners, I receive my share of emails from people who want to redo my website. They all have pretty much the same pitch: “I was reviewing your website and I saw a number of areas where I can help blah, blah, blah.”

No, you neither reviewed my site nor have a list of tailored recommendations at the ready. You may scurry to come up with something if I reply, but more likely you’ll give me the same pitch you give everyone. Oh, and I’m not in the market for a web developer, anyway. Straight to TRASH each one goes.

A refreshing exception arrived yesterday. The subject line was “New to SLC.” Not great, but not bad, either. Here’s the body:

Okay, that last line is a stretch — of course he’s trying to sell something — but I’ll overlook it since the rest of his email felt refreshing and honest. It felt that way even though I know everyone on his list received the same one. That’s the art of good, personalized copy.

​So I replied:
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I can’t vouch for his company or his work, but if you need a web person and you want to give him a try, click here or call 828-275-0888.

In a breathtaking high-speed car chase, boasted the man at our table, he and his friend barely evaded the hoodlums bent on beating the daylights out of them.

Fairly certain that the average high-speed car chase does not spontaneously generate, I asked if he and his friend might have done anything to provoke their would-be attackers.

“Yeah,” he said. “We threw beer on a couple of women as we drove by.” I asked if they knew the women. They didn’t.

Some at the table erupted in laughter at the tale, taking it as a boys-will-be-boys prank, the sort of harmless fun that is to be expected from reckless youth. No one asked what on earth had moved him and his friend to cruelly assault two women they didn’t even know.

Okay, it’s time for me to come clean.

I didn’t quite quote him accurately.

He didn’t say “women.” He said “hookers.”

When I share this anecdote, a not-unusual reaction is: Hookers? Oh, that’s different. For some, changing “women” to “hookers” seems to make the assault appear less serious — perhaps even understandable, perhaps even justifiable — because it makes the victims seem less-than-human.

“Less-than-human” is no exaggeration. You can bet the group would have expressed outrage had he confessed to throwing beer on a couple of women exiting a church. Or, for that matter, had they thrown beer on a pair of Golden Retriever puppies.

If even for a moment you caught yourself seeing “women” as entitled to protection from assault and “hookers” as not, you have experienced an instance of what sociologists call dehumanization — viewing certain people as somehow less-than-human, and thus less entitled to fair treatment. It can take the best of us unawares, which is precisely why it’s important to exercise vigilance against it.

Why must we exercise vigilance against dehumanization? Well, for starters:
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• Branding people as less-than-human is what allowed Nazi Germany to find it permissible to commit atrocities upon Jews, and allowed the rest of the world largely to look the other way. 
• For millennia, dehumanization made (and in many places still makes) it acceptable for nations to enslave those whose ethnicity didn’t match their own. 
• In the mid 19th century, dehumanization allowed the governor of Missouri to sign an order calling for the massacre of thousands of Mormons, and a good many people throughout the rest of America to nod in agreement rather than recoil in horror.
• Dehumanization allowed states in the American South, just 60 years ago, to defend the lynching of African Americans as a states rights issue.
• Even today, dehumanization makes it acceptable for some Christian Americans to protect their freedom of worship while opposing the same for Muslims.
• Dehumanization makes it seem admirable to hurl mindless epithets at members of an opposing political party. 
• Dehumanization makes it appear OK, even moral, to teach children not to play with — or, heaven forbid, grow up and marry — those outside their faith or color.
• Dehumanization makes ordinary Americans cheer at the torture of captured enemy soldiers, yet express outrage when the enemy tortures Americans.
• Dehumanization allows people to call themselves moral when they withhold human rights from a minority whose sexual orientation they find repugnant.
• Dehumanization leads people to require no evidence before deeming a specific class of visitors de facto responsible for hard economic times, and to expel them like an invasive species rather than treat them as fellow humans.

If dehumanization fails to trouble you, chances are you have never found yourself the object of it. But it should trouble you. If not for the sake of the greater human family, then for the very pragmatic reason that the tables may someday turn and place you among the dehumanized. 

Don’t think it can’t happen. Here is a partial list of people who have been dehumanized at some time or another in the United States alone: Women, children, Jews, Arabs, Catholics, Mormons, Muslims, Native Americans, African Americans, Japanese, Chinese, the French, Germans, Mexicans and other Latinos and Hispanics, Irish, Italians, Polynesians, the poor, the rich, renters, people with depression, people whose IQs were not deemed sufficiently high, people whose IQs were deemed unusually high, people with a mental illness, imbibers, the sick, the LGBT community, the religious, the non-religious, and, now, the undocumented. Odds are you fall or have fallen within at least one of the above.

It is human nature to distinguish “us” from “them.” When all humans lived in tribes given to raiding one another, there was an arguable survival advantage in it. But today we are building a world community. The recalcitrant may not like that, but check the statistics: By consciously rising above our nature, we as a world are managing to reduce war, crime, and disease. Yet we will truly succeed at becoming a world community only in as much as we eliminate from our vocabulary any pejorative that can be substituted for “human.”

I attended the first couple hours of a business conference today. I climbed into a suit for the occasion. Hadn’t done that in over two years. To my relief, it still fit.

Ever notice how silly the male business uniform looks? Decked out in dark, worsted suits, Egyptian cotton shirts, and the power tie du jour, we all waddled around looking like clones. This, in a conference where “stand out from the competition” was preached.

That’s not to say that women don’t have it worse. I am well aware of the ridiculous things society expects women to wear, “society” in this case being a euphemism for clothing designers who don’t have to wear what they design because they’re men which is a shame because if they had to wear what they design they wouldn’t design it that way.

Anyway, I left early.

I had shown up in hopes of picking up an insight or two. Nope. Same old stuff: Innovate, adapt, care about customers, empower, take risks, and mind your brand.

In the introduction to my book Of Marketing and Emasculated Goats, I bemoan business gurus who regurgitate the same old pap and adoring audiences who reward them for it by eagerly scarfing it down. That’s what this was. I don’t go to conferences to hear speakers reiterate and cheerlead. I go to have my skills sharpened, my thinking challenged, and my horizons broadened.

If I receive a follow-up survey, I’ll suggest that next year they add a break-out group for presenters called “Try saying something new. Also, remember not to bore.”

Update: They indeed did send a survey. I was honest. I expect my comments will be dismissed.

​​I am aware of only one profession that gets away with not disclosing the price until after the transaction, although in this case the seller, not the buyer, controls the price. I refer to the medical profession. Don’t believe me? Before your next surgery, try asking how much it’s going to cost.

Utah Governor Gary Herbert just signed a bill designed to fix ​​Utah Transit Authority’s (UTA) mismanagement woes. That much is good. Mr. Herbert wasn’t terribly thrilled, however, about the part calling for changing the name “Utah Transit Authority” to “Transit District of Utah.”

I’m not thrilled, either, because the change comes with a $50 million price tag.

​Proponents argue the change is a rebrand, needful to win back trust.

For most people, the UTA experience—the customer experience being the essence of any brand—consists of stepping onto a bus or train, sitting down, and riding. The scandal-laden inner workings of UTA hardly touched that experience if at all. If it did, it will be the revamp of governance and policy, not changing the name, that improves it.

If the legislature is worried about extensive, negative local media coverage of UTA’s inner workings, they should be reassured that there has also been extensive coverage of the fix. If they’re worried that some may have missed the latter, less than $100,000 toward flyers and billboards could work wonders.
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It is, to be exact, two-tenths of a percent of it.

It wouldn’t surprise me if an ad agency and a sign company turned out to have lobbied hard for the change. There’s a lot of money to be made with design (and—trust me on this—an expensive albeit lame slogan will be part of the package), changing the look of buses and trains, replacing signs, and doing an ad campaign to tell everyone what they already know.

$50 million.

​You could pay for a lot of textbooks, fix a lot of potholes, conduct a lot of medical research, vaccinate a lot of kids, provide a lot of healthcare, or feed a lot of homeless with that kind of loot.

The above-pictured billboard, part of a national campaign, makes two claims: That Cosmopolitan is porn; and that Cosmo hurts kids. The campaign comes to us courtesy of an organization fittingly named Cosmo Hurts Kids, established and run by Victoria Hearst, an heir of the Hearst magazine empire, which publishes 22 magazines including Esquire, The Oprah Magazine—and, yes, Cosmopolitan. Ms. Hearst may not be terribly popular at family reunions.

Questioning the claims risks being branded anti-child or a defender of the perverse, so please permit me to state clearly:

• I do NOT support harming kids. I rather like kids.* I have two grown kids whom I rather like. One of them has two kids of his own, whom I also rather like.
• I am neither defending nor attacking porn. I’m attempting an informed look at the billboard’s two assertions.
• I do support a rational approach. Even when handling a potato as hot as this one.

Whether Cosmo is porn is a question of definition. While most people don’t use porn to mean the likes of Cosmo so much as the likes of Playboy or Hustler and XXX movies, there are nonetheless plenty of people who embrace the broader definition, and they are capable of raising quite the outcry. In many markets, including Utah, where I live, the outcry has persuaded retailers displaying Cosmo to mask all but its masthead.

A responsible society demands good evidence for serious accusations, which “Cosmo harms kids” is. If evidence exists, and for all I know it does, Ms. Hearst’s website fails to provide it. Rather, it appeals to emotion and argues from authority, including deity. Both appeals can and do persuade, but neither actually supports the claim.

To the advantage of Cosmo Hurts Kids is today’s widely-held belief that porn is a danger, a disease, and an addictive product. These, too, are serious claims. I’m a marketer, not a psychologist, so I’m loath to mire myself in that conversation. Suffice it to say that when you step outside the realm of “everyone knows porn is harmful” and look to credentialed people taking a more academic approach,** the claim fails to hold up.

I like honest advertising. Advertising that bullies—“Disagree and everyone will think you’re a perv”—isn’t honest advertising. Good intentions aside.
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* And not in the W.C. Fields “properly cooked” sense. 
** Dr. Marty Klein’s website is a good starting place. Yeah, I know, “sex therapist” makes you want to hang garlic and hold up a crucifix—me too, most of the time—but Klein is a pretty smart guy.