Archives: Cards and leaflets

These chaps look like real fellers.

Yeaaaah…. No.

I once flew overseas into Rome on an Italian airline and it was noticeable at the breakfast meal service before landing that several passengers refrained from drinking any coffee or tea.

They were saving themselves for a ‘real Italian espresso experience’ and didn’t want to spoil it by indulging in whatever it was the airline was serving. They wanted to be good and ready for that first caffeine hit on Italian soil.

Sure enough, there was a café straight off the walkway from the plane, before passport control and customs, and the eager passengers piled in there for the first espresso of the day.

So when someone offers me ‘The real Italian espresso experience’ that’s what I think of, the sight of those people planning and looking forward and savouring the experience of drinking an espresso in Italy.

No disrespect to this coffee machine supplier who obviously understands the significance of experiencing an espresso in Italy and who, I’m sure, makes great tasting coffee, better than much of what gets served in cafes up and down the country, but don’t try telling me this is real or Italian or possibly even, for those of us who have experienced a real Italian espresso, an espresso.

I’m not buying it (although I’m always happy for anybody else to buy me a coffee and will never turn my nose up at it, even when it comes in a ridiculously tall glass and looks like liquid fertiliser).

A flyer from an insurance company – nothing to get excited about – but what intrigued me about it was the meaning of the heart-shaped hand sign. When they urge us to get the most out of our insurance – beyond, I guess, the actual provision of insurance as requested – are they seriously inviting us to fall in love with it?

Because that’s what it looks like to me although maybe I’m misreading the signals here (wouldn’t be the first time, Lord no).

So. Are these the symbolic hands of the insurance company being used to convey their tender feelings towards us (and hence their eagerness to supply us with extra ‘benefits’, whatever they may be), or are they supposed to represent our hands indicating our new-found love for all the great things that an insurance policy can offer us? Because, you see, I don’t think it’s at all clear what’s going on here.

And while the wild romantic in me is fully in agreement with the prospect of launching willy-nilly into a new and potentially exciting emotional relationship with an insurance company, the level-headed voice of experience tells me that it is prudent not to get too involved in a liaison where the expectations and intentions of either party are not fully understood.

This is especially the case with providers of insurance with whom, in the past, my relationships have tended to be somewhat fractured and tempestuous.

So excuse my hesitation and unwillingness to commit whole-heartedly when I say that rather than ‘feeling the love’ – which may or may not be genuine on their part – my preference is rather to see this flyer as just another cut-price marketing campaign employing a stock feel-good image of no particular significance in order to prompt a vapid sense of connection in a world of alienated strangers.

In other words, they don’t really care; never did, never will.