The new range
Brian was on a roll, he
had picked all the low hanging fruit and was now convinced of his creative
marketing genius. This was fine, there are often people like this who have a
strange, usually undeserved, high opinion of their abilities. The problem came
when other people got sold on the idea and started to believe Brian’s self propaganda.
He had joined the marketing department of the Dulucks Paint Company
just six months before. He had the luck to have his interview on the day that
the Head of Marketing, Christopher Scroggs, had gone down with an previously
unknown brand of virus. Mrs Scroggs thought he should take a couple of
aspirins, man up, and carry on as normal , as she would have done but no, Chris
had to go the whole seven yards. He talked himself into an appointment to see
his GP, Dr P Sillin, then trot down to the chemist with a prescription for a
completely unecessary antibiotic that the good doctor gave him just to get him
out of the door. Chris wasn’t going to be fobbed off with some advice to ‘go
home, take an aspirin and go to bed for half a day,’ that was too close to his
wife’s prescription. He paid his taxes didn’t he? What do women know about man
flu anyway? Any sly comments from Mrs Scroggs would be countered by a comment such
as, ‘it must be serious, my doctor prescribed an antibiotic and bed rest.’ This
would result in much eye rolling on the part of Mrs Scroggs and the two mini
Scroggs.
What Christopher should have foreseen was the fact that his
deputy, Miss Chlamydia Bagshot, who he knew was not very good at interviewing,
would decide that Brian was the man for the job. This proved his point about
Miss CB in a circular logic, tautological sort of way.
The task of the marketing department today was to come up with
the names for the colours of the paints in the new autumn range. Red, green and
blue didn’t do the business any more, the names had to have a feel of the shade
about them and inspire a mood. This was so that a DIY customer could decide
what sort of mood fitted their personality and aspirational style – as copied
from a glossy magazine that cost nearly five pounds and gave advice and
information that could be had for free from Fred at the local hardware store.
What Fred didn’t know about paint wasn’t… This type of consultation didn’t suit
everyone, partly because Fred’s favourite colour was a light beige that could
be self mixed by tipping the remains of the white ceiling emulsion in the half
tin of magnolia left over from last year’s burst of DIY fervour.
Brian had already come up with ‘Spring passion’ for what a
second hand car salesman would have called ‘Tart’s red’ had he been selling a
Ferrari. His offering of ‘Terra Cottage’ for a sludge brown had been met with
rapturous approval from his colleagues. ‘Chlami’ as she was know to her very
few friends, nearly leaned over and kissed him when he vouchsafed ‘Eau de Nile’
for what Fred would have known as Dark magnolia’.
Brian was flushed with success now, there was no stopping him.
At this rate he would soon be promoted to second deputy marketing secretarial
assistant. The next colour swatch was pink but Brian knew that this wasn’t good
enough. He applied his creative genius at full throttle to the brainstorming
task. ‘What is the essence of pink?’ He asked himself. What could pink
symbolise to an upwardly mobile, aspirational couple? He thought about his own
partner, Nigel. What would they call pink?
As you may have realised by now, Brian was gay. In fact he was
as ‘queer as a concrete parachute’as he liked to tell anyone who cared to
listen, which wasn’t very many. Brian was nothing if not out and proud. He was
now fifty five and had been out longer than most of his friends. ‘I was a homosexual when it was just a cottage
industry,’ was one of his proud boasts.’
He had it! The essence of pink was pig. He knew this from
watching Peppa the Pig, Sunday mornings on CBebees. Pink also had associations
with gayness. If you put the two together, you got ‘Gay pigment.’ What a superb
name for one of the new range of colours! The company would be so grateful to
him for dragging the pink pound out of many a pocket. He was beside himself
with joy. Chlami was delighted and thought Brian had excelled himself although
he had never been known to touch a spreadsheet, he much preferred a duvet.
No doubt Mr Scroggs would have been just a little sceptical
about some of Brian’s colour descriptions but he was still at home,’suffering’
from man flue and enjoying every minute of it. So all the colours were approved
by Miss Bagshot, the tins were printed in their millions, filled with the
appropriate paint and dispatched to the retail trade.
Buyers at B & K, Homebasics and some branches of Asday
shook their heads in disbelief. ‘What had Dulucks done this time, had they
finally lost it? How could an orange possibly be described as ‘Atlantic sunset,
or a beautiful pastel green as Bileous taup? The only name that was really
redolent of the colour of the paint in the tin was ‘Gay pigment.’ They knew
they wouldn’t sell any though – can you see a 23 year old macho, Saturday
morning football playing, pint drinking, husband with two kids, marching up to
the paint counter in B & K to ask for ‘two and a half litres of Gay pigment,
please?’ No, me neither. It didn’t do what it said on the tin – not if he could
help it.
So that explains how the annual gay pride march came to be
sponsored by Dulucks that year, they could see no other way of off loading all
that pinkness.
What happened next? I hear you ask.
Chris Sproggs died soon after, without ever returning to work.
His ‘man flu’ turned out to be a variant of the black death, or Graphite grey
mort, as Brian would have called it. He had apparently caught it from the lab
rats in the Dulucks R & D department.
Chlamydia Bagshot was
promoted to acting Marketing Director. She was very good at the job as she was
an accomplished actor, just not very good at marketing, directing, interviewing,
choosing paint names or…She saw the hassle that Brian had caused so she sacked
him – he never did get his yearned-for promotion.
He soon found a position as consultant colourist with Andrés’
Heir Salon on the High Street where he soon made a name for himself, Rolf Waldo
Emerson[1], by constantly complaining about the poor
spelling and errant apostrophe on the salon’s name board.
If you are interested in paint, and who isn’t, can I suggest
that you keep a lookout for Duluck’s new paint range next spring and see how
Chlamydia has got on with selecting the new colour names? You can, of course,
enjoy the names while watching Duluck’s product dry, it is nearly as much fun.
[1] "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,
adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines."
No comments:
Post a Comment