Numbing the senses by monotonously repeating an assertion is a key element in utilizing mind control techniques.

Franchising is more successful than independent business. (meme)

A big lie and monotonously repeated nonsense have more emotional appeal in a cold war than logic and reason.

Quote:

. . . well publicized facts are always the bane to the mind controllers.

Such is the Pavlovian device, repeat mechanically your assumptions and suggestions, diminish the opportunity of communicating dissent and opposition. This is the simple formula for political conditioning of the masses.

The flight from study and awareness is much too common in a world that throws too many confusing pictures to the individual. For the sake of our democracy, based on freedom and individualism, we have to bring ourselves back to study again and again. Otherwise, we can become easy victims of a well-planned verbal attack on our minds and our consciences.

– Dr. Joost A. M. Meerloo 1903 – 1976

Advertising both reflects and cements racial expectations.

From 1976.

Dinnertimin’.

Thanks to BuzzFeed.

Advertising invites us into a child-like mental state

Franchising milks an increasingly-irrelevant American Dream analogy to your investment death.

Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business:

Television is our culture’s principal mode of knowing about itself. Therefore — and this is the critical point — how television stages the world becomes the model for how the world is properly to be staged. It is not merely that on the television screen entertainment is the metaphor for all discourse. It is that off the screen the same metaphor prevails.

[Copyranter]

In-business-for-yourself, not-by-yourself BS

Advertising/Franchising + Time = Revealed Lies

You rent someone else’s brand and half-assed system for a specific time.

In business as much as Aunt Jemima reflected the black experience during slavery:

When Colonel Higbee rode into town, Aunt Jemima would order pancake supplies. Only she and the Colonel knew the ingredients for her famous pancakes. The recipe was Aunt Jemima’s secret.

A secret recipe for success and prestige.

[circa 1954: Jumping Frog]

Happy faces promising success, equality and brotherhood

Everything in advertising is chosen very, very carefully but the messenger’s true intentions leak out over time.

I wonder where Floyd Bond is now? I wonder if he still has his 2 stores? His marriage to Geanie?

Ads represent the main channel of intellectual and artistic effort in the modern world.

What happens when the ad makers take over all the popular myths and poetry?

Marshall McLuhan 1911 – 1980

If I told you this full page ad was placed in Ebony magazine, would that surprise you?

[circa 1978: Jumping Frog]

You are told softly thousands of times annually that franchises are successful

And humans see success (just as they have been evolved to recognize faces) where only randomness really exists.

The success does not materialize.

There’s  a wh0le industry out there working 24/7 to tell you how you fcuked up.

[Mighty Optical Illusions]

Advertising creates wants from satisfaction

The purpose of mom-and-pop franchising is to make you dissatisfied with your job/life/family.

[Flickr]

Is Blue MauMau slowing or hastening franchising’s decay?

The technology for dealing with franchising’s smell has changed.

Steps 1-2-3:

1. tradename system executives,
2. national franchisor-dominated associations (IFA, AAFD, CFA, FCA, FANZ) + franchise bar, and
3. Blue MauMau.org.

Musing: #3 works on the rhetorical principle that Thomas Carlyle suggests…

If you do not wish a man to do a thing, you had better get him to talk about it; for the more men talk, the more likely they are to do nothing else.

…and John Kenneth Galbraith adds…

People need to think of themselves as unmanaged, independent and free, if they are to be controlled with maximum success.

…and more colloquially still:

Bullshit baffles brains: A deception. To put on such a good show the inspector is so impressed (s)he won’t bother with a detailed check or to question anything.

Casting my perils before swains.

In this advertisement is Harry “putting on”:

1. quality clothing,
2. Matthew,
3. his private equity backers,
4. future sub-franchisees,
5. public’s sappy feelings about entrepreneurship (100% of it is good? Right?),
6. the franchise/development “game” or
7. you?
8. Or all/some of the above?

Herbivore entrepreneur or fine young cannibal? Depends if you’re wise to the play and know when to cash out. Time and Krispy Kreme will tell, I suppose.

Food for the mind is like food for the body: the inputs are never the same as the outputs.

Marshall McLuhan

The internet shocks and confounds water-based stakeholders

Modern franchising (franchisors, bar, franchisees, IndFAs) has evolved as if the industry were a plumbing/water system.

It was for many years:

1. tangible, physical/one-dimensional, hierarchical, overt
2. local/national largely, measurable, (hub:spoke structure, based on economics of scarcity/ignorance),
3. highly controlled ($: valves, fittings, pipes, containers; can be patched),
4. has inputs, use/abuse and disposal elements,
5. externalizes waste via gatekeeper attorneys,
6. launders and sanitizes industry reputations based on “new and improved” brand BS,
7. utilized shame-humiliation to muffle dissent,
8. burned off waste human life savings to reduce odor, and
9. dogmatism largely unseen/unknowable outside of the royal priesthood (subterranean, veil of secrecy, culturally taken-for-granted: figure-ground problem).

However, with the start of something called “The Internet‘ and a proper issue indexing system, the industry environment has become much more like electricity or a gaseous/liquid and solid states:

1. invisible, highly mobile, de-centralized, informal,
2. it can leap or arc, volatilizes: solid right to gas),
3. several dimension, pressures and forms (volts/amps),
4. primarily transnational/international, (web structure, based on economics of abundance/knowledge),
5. wild/unstable, cumulative, compressable, and
6. much, much faster (travels at the speed of light/life).

As an internet activist, I am bi-/multi-lingual, which is a very Canadian thing. I  understand water, solid and air nations of franchising. I surf among and between the dying and newly born on a daily basis.

Old school stakeholders cling to their old ways:

wondering why more of the same-old solutions doesn’t work anymore.

“If we only had some more legal referrals” or “a better franchise law”, they all cry.