The mountain looks so pretty when it's 12 degrees...

UPDATED BELOW:

A few years ago, I noticed that actually selling something that could be quantified, like a shoe or a car wash, had become hopelessly anachronistic in the “new” economy; we were told to pay good money for something far less tangible, “solutions.”   To what, pray tell?  Everything, as it turned out.

Any plugged-in business from housecleaning to accountancy just stopped selling what they once sold, which in the old days were something straightforward that could be easily measured in dust bunnies or IRS audits, and the preferable absence thereof, to something else entirely.  The advertising industry finally and unexpectedly just came out of the closet about its time-honored formula:  This product you never suspected you needed will solve a “problem” we just invented to sell it.  You’re not buying, say, that deodorant, mouthwash, sports car, and unusually expensive booze, you’re buying a “solution” to the not getting laid “problem.”  That problem and the “solutions” sold in its honor probably accounted for a large percentage of our fabled national wealth during the “American Century.”  The only trouble was, the “solutions” sold never solved the problem, even as Arpege and Aqua Velva sailed off the shelves, for most people the not getting laid problem, among others, was never adequately solved.  Better yet, the disappointed customers, probably rightly, blamed themselves for this unfortunate coincidence, rather than the shills that sold them whichever bill of goods.

Naturally, when any respectable Madison Avenue type spots a trend like that, you can bet it’ll be off to the races for the whole lot of them.  I mean, once it has clearly been scientifically proven that people will not only spend more than they can afford on products which offer “solutions” that never seem to materialize, but that their invariable response to each predictable failure is to seek out another potentially profitable, for its creator, anyway, “solution,” the sky is the limit.  Kind of makes shooting fish in a barrel look hard.    Given all that, there was something of a an almost unseemly pile-on.  When it became apparent that virtually every part of our “service” economy that had replaced what lay before, back in the “thing” days, was pure air, why should anyone sell anything that couldn’t creatively be described as a “solution?”  Once copier repairmen, loan sharks, and real estate agents stopped doing what they were supposed to do, and marketed themselves selling solutions instead, could hookers and drug dealers be far behind?  They, after all, sell solutions, too. The main difference is that their clients almost always get their problem, at least temporarily, “solved,” a contrast that might be unflattering to, say, mortgage brokers.

Fearing such degrading of the “solutions” brand, and the dire results it could have for such formerly trusted names as, say Blackwater or Halliburton, I am proud to report the first international conglomerate that decided to try to beat the competition by daringly selling something more obviously more substantive than tired old airy-fairy “solutions.” Siemens, the German conglomerate, must have a better ad agency than most; in addition to blanketing liberal talk with commercials about its “50,000 Americans” making America a better place and laying in a striking and controversial background ad that eclipses Daily Kos, it has blanketed the blogosphere, and probably elsewhere, with big, big news.

Wait for it….  It’s selling “answers.”  You know, those totally new things which are a lot more valuable than those crappy old solutions…..

Hookers take note.

UPDATE: A bank in Overland Park, Kansas folded yesterday.  Its name?  SolutionsBank.