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The history of Bonk was built upon these three periods (+ one more).

  • Renewables - eventually overused to the pint of extinction (Baltic anchovy)
  • Reusables - finally made un-usables (Defunctioned machinery)
  • Consumables - turning into re-consumables - Repacking*.

The last period of corporate history, never completed, but seriously begun, was exploration of the noosphere, where human brains are the renewables, and the 3 part process begins again.

*Repacking is a Bonk Business innovation, in which mediocre products are purchased retail or in bulk, have their old etiquettes or packaging removed, and are Repacked with new Bonk labels and sold at a premium, ie with a huge mark-up. We called this 'The Power of the Label'. Expectations of a product will influence eventual enjoyment of the product.

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Aug 16th, 2009 at 12:50:53 PM EST
[ Parent ]
The idea of repackaging is actually not a joke. Danish consumer electronics brand B&O excels at selling stylish designer electronics - but under the hood, a lot of it is precisely the same thing as the no-name brands.

Similar games go on with many kinds of pre-packaged foods: The brand-name food can easily cost five or six times as much as the no-name brand does... even when it comes out of precisely the same machine, in precisely the same UniLever factory, using precisely the same settings and inputs.

- Jake

Friends come and go. Enemies accumulate.

by JakeS (JangoSierra 'at' gmail 'dot' com) on Sun Aug 16th, 2009 at 03:28:03 PM EST
[ Parent ]
In a sponsor campaign with Silja Lines (cross Baltic ferries), we put a Bonk exhibition on board. As part of that (Bonk menu in the gourmet restaurant etc),  we also ordered a decent wine from France, that was repackaged as Chateau Bonk. We shipped them the etiquettes. We sold 14 pallets of that onboard in the duty free in a week. I've heard that people are still hoarding them. Not very advisable when we also sold a sticker kit, so that anybody could Repack their own Bonk bottle of wine - if they could be bothered to soak it to remove the old label.

That's why the gluemeisters at the Bonk Repacking Division were so valued ;-)

You can't be me, I'm taken

by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Aug 16th, 2009 at 03:42:56 PM EST
[ Parent ]
See also ThatBritGuy's Economics Pt 1 - Marketing for Dummies.

En un viejo país ineficiente, algo así como España entre dos guerras civiles, poseer una casa y poca hacienda y memoria ninguna. -- Gil de Biedma
by Migeru (migeru at eurotrib dot com) on Sun Aug 16th, 2009 at 03:51:00 PM EST
[ Parent ]
Marketing 101 - don't sell objects, seduce with promised rare experiences.
by ThatBritGuy (thatbritguy (at) googlemail.com) on Sun Aug 16th, 2009 at 07:25:58 PM EST
[ Parent ]
hah, a pearl worthy of dan draper!

(madmen reference)

'The history of public debt is full of irony. It rarely follows our ideas of order and justice.' Thomas Piketty

by melo (melometa4(at)gmail.com) on Tue Aug 18th, 2009 at 05:56:20 AM EST
[ Parent ]
Nokia has been largely perceived as a repacker in the past, which is why it has now rebranded itself as a software company, concealing 3 divisions: a technical research division that looks ahead,  a marketing division that looks ahead and feeds back into the tech division, and a global logistics aggregator division. The network hardware business (where the real money was for many years) was spun off into a joint venture with Siemens. I've lost contact with that side - I don't know how it's doing. They were trying to fuse two organizations with totally different business structures and methods. That never seemed an easy task at the time it happened.

You can't be me, I'm taken
by Sven Triloqvist on Sun Aug 16th, 2009 at 03:55:07 PM EST
[ Parent ]
I think that is a little unfair to B&O, who do a great job of selecting the proper sub-products and packaging them into an artistically designed whole. It is not an easy task to do that and then to support it, but by doing so they are able to give support to their clients which the majority of their clients couldn't get if they put their own package together...if they could.

Never underestimate their intelligence, always underestimate their knowledge.

Frank Delaney ~ Ireland

by siegestate (siegestate or beyondwarispeace.com) on Tue Aug 18th, 2009 at 04:29:45 AM EST
[ Parent ]

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