The prophet of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormon Church, recently asked everyone to quit calling the Mormon Church “the Mormon Church,” to quit using “Mormon” as a modifier of, well, things Mormon, and even to quit using the initialization “LDS,” short for “Latter-day Saints.” It is, he said, “non-negotiable.”

Ironically, the request went out via the church’s MormonNewsroom.org.

I admit coming to the party a little late, since by now pretty much everyone has weighed in. My favorite commentaries so far are this one by self-described oxy-Mormon columnist Robert Kirby and this one by Boston Globe columnist and Mormon historian Alex Beam.

But since I’m a marketing consultant who knows a thing or two about brands and who happens to live in Utah, here I am, adding my two cents.

First cent: This isn’t the first time the church has made this request.

It made a similar appeal shortly before the Winter Olympics came to Salt Lake City in 2002. Among its worries was that in many minds “Mormon” invokes polygamy. That, and “Mormon Church” doesn’t sound like a Christian church, which the Mormon Church would like everyone to know it is.
 
The dictum didn’t work out in 2002. It won’t work out this time, either. 
 
Second cent: Chevy supports my point.

In 2010, the Chevrolet Division of General Motors Company asked everyone to stop saying “Chevy.” Pardon my resorting to marketing jargon, but: What a bunch of idiots. The market, not the company, came up with Chevy. It was convenient, endearing, and ensconced. There was no getting rid of it. Before long, the Chevrolet Division of General Motors Company came to its senses and re-embraced the nickname. 
 
Likewise, it was the market that bestowed “Mormons” on Mormons and “the Mormon Church” on the Mormon Church. It began as a term of derision but in time morphed into an inoffensive identifier. It wasn’t long before even the church embraced it. That’s why it’s the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, not The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Tabernacle Choir.

At least, for now.
 
Like the 2002 effort, the new directive will eventually disappear. The most devout and anal Mormons and the Mormon-owned press will do their best to follow the new directive. Outside of that, the press and ordinary, everyday people will continue using “Mormon.” Like “Chevy,” it is convenient, ensconced, and, at least to some, endearing.

In time, the church will give in—again. There will be no special announcement. The church will simply stop raising the issue and let it go quietly away.

​EVIL MARKETERS must soon cease from tricking people into believing that soybean plants have mammary glands. FDA chair Scott Gottlieb wants to make it illegal to label as milk any product that doesn’t come from a lactating animal.

That’s right. You can breathe easy, knowing you will never again be taken in by the likes of soy, rice, almond, macadamia nut, and other so-called “milks.”

The proposed regulation comes not a moment too soon. Heaven forbid someone might try to milk an almond tree. Or that Playboy​ might feature a rice pictorial.

Meanwhile, it’s perfectly okay to market alternative medicine as medicine, chiropractors and naturopaths as physicians, product-based pyramid schemes as network marketing, and organic and natural products as if they weren’t cons riding the Appeal to Nature Fallacy.

Concerned citizen that I am, I have prepared a list of products for Gottlieb’s future crackdowns:

• Peanut butter isn’t really butter.
• Naugas don’t have hides.
• Chili peppers aren’t of the pepper family. 
• Mars bars aren’t made on Mars.
• A quarter pounder costs way more than a quarter per pound.
• There is no tooth in toothpaste.
• Facebook isn’t a book.
• Best Foods’s foods aren’t the best foods.
• Honeycomb cereal doesn’t contain honeycombs.
• Lady Gaga is really Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta.
• ​​​Shih tzus aren’t real dogs.
• Lululemon products contain no lemon.

​If you’re so cynical as to suspect that the dairy industry is behind the proposed change, let me state clearly and for the record that, well, yeah, it is. Which is funny for two reasons. (1) A word change will be a revelation to no one. Alt-milk sales aren’t growing like mad among people who don’t know a macadamia nut from a cow, but among people who know what’s in real milk and don’t want to consume it. (2) By lobbying for the word change, the dairy industry makes itself (and Gottlieb) look silly.

Mind you, I support the FDA. Most of the time. I like the sense of security that comes from knowing I’m consuming products that have passed scrutiny. Moreover, readers of this blog know I’m no defender of misleading advertising. I might add, too, that I love milk. Chocolate milk is the food of the gods. And, no, I have no alt-milk clients.

Thing is, the idea behind the FDA is consumer, not industry, protection. Until a significant portion of the population are misled into thinking they can milk magnesium, the proposed crackdown protects no consumer. The FDA should tell the dairy industry to pipe down. Otherwise, we’ll have to find another word for milking, as in, the U.S. dairy industry is already milking the federal government for 73 percent of its revenues. 

Last week I wrote about the Center for Inquiry’s (CFI) needful and courageous suit against CVS pharmacies for marketing homeopathic—a euphemism for medical quackery—products alongside real medicine. A new video from CFI, below, will tell you more. I recommend watching all two minutes of it now, while it’s on your mind.

I’m a longstanding CFI member and supporter. I urge you to join and support them as well.

​​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”?
​

• 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:
​

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:
​

• 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.