Learn from A Coffee Commercial

I am yet to tu
30 (I'm not too old), but when I was growing up, I vividly remember a few commercials for a well-known coffee company that essentially depicted people with messy morning hair and no smile suddenly transition into happy, ambitious, ready-for-work people after they drank a cup of joe. Within seconds they were happy.

Unknown to me, this almost set the status quo of what work should be: miserable to the point where coping mechanisms are necessary. I was lucky that my father was always a nose-to-the-grindstone type, and having a successful brother took me away from the mentality of lazy work, but when I worked for someone else during college, I accepted average management.

Thinking back and coming strictly from a psychological and persuasive standpoint, the coffee company in question had brilliant advertising. In an indirect manner, the company told us that mornings are not fun. They associated mornings with a person who is not beautiful. Immediately, this paints an ugly picture in the human brain. After all, a cosmetics company wouldn't have an actor with messy hair promoting their products.

In society, every morning, when a person wakes up to prepare to go to work, they feel that it is okay to not enjoy coming to the office. After all, Joe on the coffee commercial wasn't happy. However, it's not that he wasn't happy, it's just he wasn't well put together: unhappiness is just immediate association.

People who work for leaders enjoy work. People who work for managers associate the word "work" with negativity. Phrases like "I worked until 8 o'clock," have a negative connotation in our society.

When the consumer is told that work is a necessary evil, it allows poor managers to keep doing what they are doing - nothing. They have a "Take it or go elsewhere," mentality. They are insecure and unhappy, therefore the employees should suffer.

Society's low expectation for managers does not always apply to the aggressive, mean managers.

Managers who sit in their offices, are afraid of being seen and who do not grow others should be held just as accountable as the people not taking up their own growth. Hiding in your office is no excuse. To be a good manager, you have to buck the trend of laziness, thus leaving yourself open to rejection.

Another good example of the advertising world indirectly allowing the common manger to keep his job would be a recent energy drink commercial.

It begins with a scene depicting a man waking up in the morning with a face on him as if he were going to a funeral. The man has messy hair and he is wearing scruffy clothes.

Advertisers know a lot more about the human mind than we might assume while watching the latest hackneyed ad. Advertisers tell humans that it is normal to associate work with negativity.

It's not just a coincidence that almost all caffeine advertisers depict a person who is in ruins until he drinks their product. At that point, he is well dressed, well groomed and has the positive outlook as if he were an executive of a Fortune 100 company.

Getting to this point, I have had to fight people at every resistance point possible. There were those who exte
al individuals who fought me. They were my bad managers. I just didn't accept it. There will be more bad managers in the future, but that's for a later date.

In closing, very smart, persuasive and talented adverting executives at that coffee company have indirectly allowed managers to get away with having subordinates of my generation that don't like their job. The commercials set psychological standards that said low moral is absolutely okay.

Do you think that things would be different if in the commercials, the person drinking the coffee was a nicely dressed, manger with a happy workforce around him?