Aunt Maud’s Selection Box and Harry’s Humanitron Kit: An Elementary Marketing Analogy
Arthur was, by and large, a bright and happy teenager, but one event of the year filled him with dread: Christmas Day.
It wasn’t just the familiar clichés of carol singing, the comedians of a bygone era on television, the plastic fairies with lipstick wings suspended indefinitely from the Christmas tree, or the obligatory turkey with pan gravy that made him so sick; it was the present opening ceremony that disgusted him to the core.
Every year her father stoically feigned bland enthusiasm at the Ceremony while her mother, always at the forefront of the ritual, sat beside him writing in what, to her eyes, looked like a ledger. As she took turns undressing each of the shabby and ostentatiously decorated items, after they had first been removed from her little red stocking, she had to describe it, by name of the donor, and record it.
The sound of his own voice startled him as, once again, he looked away and uttered nonchalantly, “Aunt Maud. Selection box.” Her mother dutifully and instinctively entered this item on the credit side of the ledger, muttering, “That’s nice, dear” (she had always maintained that the ledger was simply a “thank you” column, but Arthur told him.) doubted). Arthur opened the selection box, an assortment of six chocolate bars, each as sugary and disgusting as the next, and placed it behind his chair.
But one year, Arthur was in for a big surprise. Between the usual red stockings and wrapping paper that buried their ankles in cherubim and seraphim, there was a box that had none of that angelic, elvish flavor; and he wasn’t even masked with a tricky silver ribbon.
When it was his turn to select a present, this was the one he grabbed first, tearing the wrapper with unusual haste. He had a note inside: “Design your own world with a Humanitron. Love, Harry.” An unlikely and unusual gift from Arthur’s maternal grandfather.
That afternoon, Arthur set up the Humanitron in his room and shakily pressed the power switch. The machine came alive with a buzz that excited him, an experiment that had to be understood and misunderstood at once.
Reading the instruction manual carefully, Arthur found that the Humanitron “simulated meta-creation and pseudo-evolution for use by carbon-based planetary bipeds,” with the proud owner defining the rules. Also, there was a draft switch so he could correct any mistakes along the way. This 3D machine was spinning in front of him nervously.
After a month of accelerated evolutionary noise, Arthur suddenly lost heart. Hundreds of thousands of years of evolution had already passed, accelerated by the accelerator warp, and humanity was still nowhere to be seen. All he had created were primates reaching for fruit on their hind legs. Desperate, he turned to the Internet to find out the cause.
There were literally hundreds of blogs about how, why and what for planetary formation and evolution, but none, as far as he could see, about how humans came to inhabit this space. Then, by chance, he clicked on a site, which to Arthur’s young mind was wickedly surreal.
He said that in order to create humanity in a Humanitron, environmental controls had to be taken into account. Arthur had created a peaceful world, a world in which all creatures lived in broken harmony. But here was advice, coming from an “authoritative” source, recommending adding “battle”, turf defense”, “domination”, “barbarism”, “savagery” and “selfishness” to the model for any hope of success. .
Sensing that he had to create humans as his ultimate goal, he changed the expectant “humanistic” approach he had previously taken and ran the program again.
Sure enough, whoever wrote that tip must have known his pseudo-evolutionary stuff quite well, for after a couple of weeks he watched in amazement as his model began to create creatures that, in stark contrast to what he thought of himself, were his own. Type.
The Humanitron hummed and sputtered positively about war and species annihilation; he marveled at the deep blue planet of soldiers and slave markets; of rape, suffering and greed. His world had been brought into existence. He, Arthur, the great architect, a man of genius and significant insight, even a god, had created man. And, even better, it went against everything his father had said about him.
Now recognized by his worshipers in different guises, in different countries and in different empires and from different audiences, the beauty and evil of Arthur’s brave new world had been conquered. His immortal success was right up there with being in the universally appreciated #1 position on Google – God’s own search engine.
In the right mood, Arthur was applauded wherever he went and people showered him with gifts from near and far. But, after a while, Arthur began to tire of this divine praise and adulation and once again settled for a quieter life, visiting Woolworths every Sunday afternoon for his Selection Box fix.
And every Christmas thereafter, Arthur delicately arranged the fairies and hung the balls on the tree, obediently watched The Two Ronnies, and helped his mother make the sauce for the bread.