Blurring the Lines

Remember a few years back when Kentucky Fried Chicken officially changed their name to an acronym - KFC? The thinking was that having the word 'Fried', which conjures up unhealthy thoughts, prominently displayed in your name probably wasn't the best idea. So they just changed their name to the commonly abbreviated form hoping that, over time, people would simply forget that KFC was actually fried chicken from Kentucky and continue to stuff their fat faces with it. That Colonel Sanders is a f#$^ing genius...

This isn't the first time this has happened in the food industry - anyone remember Super Sugar Crisps? But we may be witnessing the same phenomenon in a much larger scale today. Next time you see a car commercial take note of how they reference fuel efficiency. You are witnessing first-hand the automobile industry's attempt to replace the term 'Miles per Gallon' with the abbreviation MPG in the English lexicon. They are doing this so that when it's referred to, it's just a number that can be compared to another number and not an actual metric that has meaning. If you say that car A gets 12 miles per gallon of gasoline compared to car B which gets 24 miles per gallon, it's obvious what the advantages are - it's a linear relationship with car B being twice as efficient. Compare that to horsepower - something that people just want more of, even though they don't really know what adding 25 HP means from a practical standpoint. That's where it's going with MPG - the industry wants the public to just think more is better, without really understanding what it means.

Why would they want to do this? It should be obvious - the push today is towards more efficient vehicles, which costs the auto industry billions upon billions of dollars in research and manufacturing. They want to bring it back down. So today 12 MPG compared to 40 MPG sucks, obviously, because you know what it means. But 10 years from know they'll be able to say this car has 18 MPG but that one only has 15 MPG, with the hope being the populace is dumb enough to simply say, "Well, 18 is better than 15" and not realize the impacts.

So cherish this moment! The moment where billions of marketing dollars are at work, attempting to make consumers the world over that much dumber...