There’s a branch of marketing that apparently hasn’t made its way to El Paso yet. It’s called Brand Management.
At my house I have this new invention. It’s like a teevee with a typewriter attached. In fact I’m using it right now.
In the old days, before they came out with this new invention, brand management was top down. Brands were what they said they were, and no one could argue. Advertisers bought spots in the media, and said their detergents made your whites the whitest and your colors the brightest. That their cigarettes had the most flavor and made you a man. That their automobiles would get you laid.
Politicians said that they were honest and only interested in the good of the community. Prosperity. Justice. Economic development.
Nowadays they say that Brand Management is a conversation. What that really means is that when a brand is full of shit, consumers can call them out. See, that new invention, the one that’s like a teevee with a typewriter attached, is connected to similar inventions all over the world through hoses that they call the interweb.
So brands have to really be what they say they are. They call that Brand Integrity.
Integrity is not a word that’s much associated with local government. Because they’ve falling into the habit of lying to us.
I mean, like, all the time.
And it’s not just local government. The El Paso Electric Company also seems not to have heard of Brand Management. Raising rates after they just had a rate increase and made $96.8 million in profits? Declaring war on people with solar panels on their roof?
City government and EPEC don’t care what you think of them. They figure they can lie, or advertise, their way out of it.
Were you at the city council meeting where the gentleman asked the city to fight the new rate increase? EPE is a publicly traded entity and a monopoly AND, as such, should not be taxing the citizens for their capital improvements. Go back to the ice storm when they said their equipment wasn’t up to drastic temp shifts. Or go back to two days ago when the wind knocked our power out for two hours then we had a power outage for another hour when the wind wasn’t even blowing. All our utilities are just as arrogant as our politicians and think every resident is stupid.
I wasn’t there but I watched it on the net. He said that El Pasoans pay the highest electric rates in Texas.