Saad sent this fine example of everyday patriarchy, and the Power of Pink™:
Okay, the only actual difference I see here is the pill colour. Orange in the standard package, pink in the special Pink Power package. Oh, wait, the Pink Power states it’s for sensitive stomachs. Going by the handy dandy coding, this means only women have sensitive stomachs. Sorry men, you can’t have one of those. There’s a bit more interesting coding, too. The standard package: Gentle, predictable overnight relief. The Pink Power package: Gentle, dependable relief for sensitive stomachs. Women aren’t interested in predictable, no. They want dependable. Got to have that specifically coded assurance of stability and security, a pat on the hand, a pink promise you’ll be taken care of, sensitively.
Jesus, what a load of shit. A bright pink load of shit.
I would totally buy the pink ones. I treat medicine the way I treat candy -- pink/red/purple are better than orange/yellow, which are better than green/blue (yuck).
Alexander:
That sounds like me. :D Only I go red/orange/purple best; green/blue is only if I have no choice.
Marketing lies. And marketing’s lies are often gender-oriented. Fuck marketing.
When I was a kid I learned that the French believed medicine worked better if you had to stick it up your butt. If that medicine didn’t work, it had to taste nasty.
So I concluded a giant buttplug covered with syrup of ipecac would cure anything(just kidding)
Marcus:
Erg, suppositories. Not fun. When I was young, if we had a sore throat, my grandfather would make us take a spoonful of sugar wet with kerosene. That wasn’t fun either.
Caine @ 5
Answer to the question “What’s bad for both machines and humans?”
if we had a sore throat, my grandfather would make us take a spoonful of sugar wet with kerosene
I bet you stopped complaining!!
Ice Swimmer:
Yep. We learned to keep our mouths shut if we got a sore throat.
Marcus:
Yes! In that sense, it was a complete success.
Okay, I have to ask. Was there a difference in price?
Marie @ 10:
I don’t know. Saad took the photo, but I don’t know if they noticed the prices.
Apparently a teaspoon of jet fuel can cure cancer.
Don’t ask, I saw this one acted out in real life. You can all predict the results.
rq:
:blinks: Holy fuck, I can’t…oh, no.
rq #12
I knew a Russian who used to drink jet fuel. It has some alcohol in it to prevent freezing so what some Russians do is pour water to separate the fluids and then drink the water+alcohol layer through a straw.
Marie, #10
Nope, identical pricing (and ingredient).
I don’t know why they even bothered. They have to clearly write the ingredient and its strength on the packaging so who do they think they’re fooling? At least with things like cotton swabs or tissue paper they can make up some bullshit reason for why they’re gendered.
Apparently a teaspoon of jet fuel can cure cancer.
By killing the patient?
Alexander @ 14:
I sincerely hope I am never that desperate for anything.
Just a thought: it is possible that the association between pink color and gentler for stomachs is related to the long history of Pepto-Bismol and its many copycats, which all employ the pink color for effect. Having grown up with the Pepto-Bismol commercials prominently showing the (animated) pink liquid running down the sides of a stomach assuring us that it “coats and soothes,” I probably have a touch of that bias as well.
AlexanderZ
Nope, a teaspoon of jet fuel straight up.
This was attempted after the homeopathy didn’t work.
If there was an open flame nearby, it probably was straight up.
TGAP Dad:
That’s definitely a possibility. I do have a hard time viewing this in such an innocent light, because of all the years of intense marketing tying the colour pink to women and breast cancer. Even assuming they wanted to tap the Pepto gentle, it would have made it even more stupid, as Saad pointed out, because they have the ingredients clearly listed on the front of the box -- there’s no difference.
Humans. You might like to think you’re oh-so-rational and intelligent, but the truth is you’re WAY more influenced by things like choice of fonts or use of whitespace (which isn’t necessarily white) than you like to think. And remember -- if you’re reading this, you’re likely of above average intelligence. Most people are dumber and more easily influenced than you, and those people are the target market.
And it is a researched, well-established proven fact that the placebo effect is real, and is weird. The colour, size and shape of a pill and the box it comes in matters, and can and does have a measureable, repeatable effect on how efficacious the treatment is even if there’s no active ingredient in the box. And if you think that sounds like bullshit, reality respectfully disagrees.
So before you start going all “marketing is evil! patriarchy is evil! but I don’t fall for that bollocks because I’m so smart”… ask a doctor. http://www.badscience.net/2007/09/homeopathy-gives-you-aids/#more-531
Sonofrojblake:
If you’re the type of person who assumes a doctor (or a scientist) just has to be right because doctor, well, yes, you’ll most likely fall for everything and anything.*
I think most people reading, and commenting on this, are already aware of why marketing works. It’s just frustrating to see it, and know that most people don’t have critical thinking skills, what with education seeming to be more dedicated to obscurantism.
*Nothing against Ben Goldacre, I have some of his books, and he’s a pretty terrific person that more people should read.
Well yeah, I didn’t just mean any random passing bought-it-online PhD (“Doctor” Gillian McKeith, for example, subject of Goldacre’s favourite joke: “Gillian McKeith, or to give her her full, medical title… Gillian McKeith”.). In fact I meant Ben Goldacre specifically, and I don’t think he’s right because he’s a doctor, I think he’s right because he cites his sources and I checked some.
Hmm… I’m not sure that’s true. I think I know how it works -- print X on Y in font Z and it’ll sell better than A printed in font C onto B -- but I think the why remains mysterious in most cases, unless you subscribe to some of the pop-evo-psych explanations (which I generally don’t). There are a lot of people making a lot of money selling the answer to “why”, but since many of them contradict each other I file them in the same bucket as feng shui and religion.
Ethical dilemma: I teach you “critical thinking skills”. As a result, you overcome the cultural connontation you previously held about the significance of colours in packaging and pills (actually unlikely, but possible). As a result… those pills now don’t work as well for you as they did before.
Have I done you a favour? I mean… you’re better informed, certainly, “smarter” by reasonable definitions… but you’re also in subjectively more pain than you would otherwise have been. In this case, ignorance really may be bliss.
Or that ethical dilemma may be academic -- I don’t know if it’s even possible to educate the gullibility out of the human mind. Sure you can teach people not to believe in ghosts and psychics and priests, but can you teach them not to get better from a stomach ulcer quicker on four sugar pills than they would on two? Never mind whether you should -- is it even possible?
sonofrojblake, #22
Are you implying Boehringer Ingelheim made a pink womeny variation of the drug because pink laxatives have been observed to be more efficacious in women? That sounds like bullshit to me.
Or is it that they’re merely using a widespread, long-standing sexist marketing scheme. Just like the toy aisles marketed towards girls are almost monochrome pink (and severely lacking in trucks and action figures).
So many real and certified doctors here push homeopathic and naturopathic medicines, it’s become hard to tell which professionals one should trust.
Sonofrojblake:
Neither did I. I meant what I wrote, meaning, specifically, anyone who is a medical doctor, or a scientist of some sort. A great many people have automatic faith in doctors and scientists. With your razor sharp understanding of all things marketing, I assumed you’d be aware of that.
It doesn’t seem mysterious to me. Then again, I’m an artist, and understanding how and why people are attracted to things is kind of important. Naturally, it’s silly to boil it all down to something like “ooh, pretty colour!”. There are many strands to effective marketing, but it’s not quite as complex as some people like to make out.
Oh for fuck’s sake. It is too fucking early in the morning, my time, for this brand of utter bullshit. I know how to think critically. I know how to assess packaging, and more importantly, the information on packaging, along with pricing. This results in me buying a fair amount of shit in ugly packaging, when my eye much prefers the “oooh, pretty colour!” ones. That is not some sort of high falutin’, arcane fucking knowledge. Anyone can learn to do the same, self taught or by taking a handy dandy class at a local school -- which are offered all over the place, across the world.
I am also a person who lives with pain, every single second of every single minute of every single hour of every single fucking day. For years. It will be that way for the rest of my fucking life, and I’ll thank you not to make out that every person on this godsdamn planet is some sort of dumbfuck who will get all happy and pain-free with a pretty package and a placebo. Placebos don’t work on me, never have. They don’t work on any of the many people I know who are also chronic pain patients. I’m sure there are plenty of people who do indeed benefit from placebos, just like people claim to benefit from prayer. Whatever works. Teaching people to think critically will not suddenly make their life lose quality, and those people who tend to benefit from things like meditation, prayer, and so on, will keep benefiting from such things.
And that’s all I have to say, for now, on this.
Then I accept your thanks, since I clearly didn’t say that or anything even slightly like it.
Half the sanitary products I buy for my wife are in pink boxes… but the rest are in blue boxes. Are those the tampons for men?
When I get indigestion I chew Gaviscon tablets. They are pink and come in a pink box, although if I were to buy the bottled stuff the label on that bottle is blue… but the stuff inside it is pink. Do only women get indigestion, or are Gaviscon tablets aimed at women? My “sensitive teeth” toothpaste has a big pink stripe down the side. When it comes to anything vaguely medicinal, pink=”gentler”, whatever that means, rather than “women”.
I don’t imagine Boehringer Ingelheim have done any placebo-style studies checking the medical efficacy of different coloured pills and boxes. I’m guessing they just put in the FDA approved amount of the active ingredient and move on. But I’d be prepare to bet double digits that they’ve worked long and hard focus-grouping their packaging to within an inch of its life so it sells more units, which is more important than anything else when the drug you’re pushing is competing with a generic non-branded version that’s probably an eighth of the price.
sonofrojblake, #29
So would I. I suppose the motivation for making a pink version could really be about “gentleness” but it’s hard to tell it apart from the widespread use of it to mean “for women”.
The reason for my reply was because your placebo comment didn’t make sense in this context. Making it pink because it’ll move more product says nothing about efficacy and therefore nothing about the placebo effect..
sonofrojblake @ 28:
sonofrojblake:
You might want to limit your assholishness here, I have an extremely low tolerance for it. You came into this thread with the standard, arrogant, atheist assholism, “people are stupid and gullible.” Yeah, sure they are, until they are able to learn better. That goes for all of us. When I called you on your previous crap, you come up with this unbelievably offensive “ethical dilemma”. “Oh, the poor stupid people. If they learn, then their placebos won’t work!”
I have to assume here that you don’t have the slightest idea of how you come off with this bullshit, because that makes me feel a tiny bit better about you spewing it all over this thread. I can’t even…fuck. Do you deal with serious medical issues on a regular basis? I do. Doctors, and by extension, scientists, are auto-trusted because people are taught from a young age to do so, and not to question them. Ever. It takes work to overcome that, and learning. That’s why there’s a whole field called medical advocacy. I’ve acted as a medical advocate for people, and I’ve had a medical advocate myself, when I knew I’d be facing something which would be hard for me to process. The whole point of advocacy is to have someone who is knowledgeable, and capable of critical thinking skills, being there to catch all the stuff you probably aren’t even fucking hearing at the time. They are also there to suss out dumbfuck doctors, and there are a lot of them.
When it comes to things I consider placebos, like imaging, meditation, etc., doctors know not to waste time talking to me about such things, because I’ve discussed that with my advocate first. My husband, on the other hand, swears by imaging, and it helps him. I don’t consider him a gullible, stupid person because of that. It does help him, and he knows there’s not a lot in the literature to back it up. He’s read studies, all the charts and graphs and yes, he knows how to parse those correctly, because, like me, he read Ben Goldacre on that very subject. Here’s the thing -- more and more people are invested in learning about such things, including marketing tricks. You don’t just go with “gullible and stupid.” Everyone is gullible and stupid about something, until they learn. Rather than make arrogant statements, time would be better spent helping people to learn about such things, the right way to interpret them, and again, how to think critically. Telling me that might be a bad thing to do to poor stupid Joe Public won’t win you favours here.
I regret offending you. I’m sorry. I won’t do it again.
Okay, but the association is there, since women are often portrayed as being the naturally gentler sex… so even if pink only means ‘gentler’, there’s still a certain amount of feminine coding happening.
Labeling it “gentler” and coloring it pink might relieve some of the nocebo effect (people having side effects because they took a drug and are sure that doing so will do something bad to them.)