Okay listen.
Does that about cover it?
I’ve heard of training courses based on that, and they appeared to be designed to persuade the peons to be happy about whatever arbitrary changes management inflicted on them, and quit complaining about having no agency over their lives. Accurate?
Yup. I don’t know what the differences are, so I usually buy whichever’s on sale. If the results are bad, I don’t get that one again. And I recognise the different versions by colour, so I really hope they don’t decide to change that too.
Irrelevant.
Some change is good. Some change is bad. Some change is neutral.
Shitty managers try to shame people who object to significant bad changes by pretending that they’d object to any change. That’s awful behavior. They act like any change is necessarily good.
But that’s not what’s going on here. Marketers are changing their marketing messages all the fucking time. They’re changing logos and descriptions of cereal and rolling out new ad campaigns and introducing new bottle shapes and all sorts of shit. 99% of them don’t get objected to.
But somehow, when they declare that they’re not privileging white people hair as normal hair, suddenly it’s all about cognitive load?
Give me a break.
Nicely summed up.
One company is changing one word on their shampoo bottles.
Almost like holding up a “All/White/Blue Lives Matter” sign.
Sorry, I’m the opposite. I don’t know what “qualities” my hair (or skin, or whatever) has. I’m not a hair expert or a shampoo connosseur. Show me too many options and types and special features, and I’ll just be baffled. I just want a normal shampoo, for normal guys!
That said, I think I understand the reason for Unilever’s change, and I don’t have a problem with it.
They weren’t doing that. The ‘normal’ is the middle of a range from dry to oily, and white people are included in all those categories. Are they saying only some white people are normal?
The word you are looking for is average, not normal.
This is a pedantic nitpick to distract from the larger dynamic, and I’m not especially interested in entertaining it.
I didn’t pick it.
LOL. It makes no sense and you know it.
You know what? I really don’t care what they call shampoo, and I don’t have ‘normal’ hair anyway. I was hoping I could persuade a few posters to see someone else’s point of view, have a little empathy for those who are unhappy about the increasing amount of change modern society throws at us, both necessary and unnecessary. But I can see that’s not going to happen, so never mind.
Again… shampoo label. People unhappy about shampoo labels not having the word “normal” on them do not deserve empathy. Nobody is harmed or minimized or made less of a person because the “normal to oily hair” shampoo now says “average to oily hair”.
Where’s YOUR empathy for the people who are implicitly being told, “you are not normal”?
I have lots of empathy for people who are tired of having to deal with being expected to learn how to do what used to be routine things in entirely different ways, and then to learn them all over again every time the computer program changes.
Empathy for people who are upset about changing shampoo labels, which have been changing since before I was born, which was 1951? That, I’m kind of thin on.
Empathy for people who are upset about those changes specifically when they make the shampoo aisle more comfortable for other people, but don’t seem concerned when it’s just that the shampoo company feels like changing the name of the specific version three times a year so they can have “fall” on the label in the autumn and spring blossoms on the label in the spring? That, I’m extremely thin on.
yeah, same. Which is why my current bottle of shampoo doesn’t make any promises except “shampoo”.
I’m surprised this is in the news now, as it was a year or three ago when I went to buy shampoo and couldn’t find any that said “normal”. So I bought a couple that didn’t make any special claims, and threw out the one that smelled bad. They both worked fine on my hair.
This was less traumatic than when Pepperidge farm took the delicious tropical oils out of their cookies. 
Oh, I have plenty of empathy, being one of the people having trouble keeping up with change. But this is an extremely small change, and marketing folks change the labels all the time. And this one even has some obvious upside. Small, but it offsets the small downside, and then some, imo.
That’s pretty damned petulant. You’re nitpicking to make it seem like this isn’t about white people sad they’re not considered normal, when the complaints are clearly about that. If you want me to feel pity for white people who hate not being at the center of the marketing universe, you’re right, I’m fresh out of pity to bring to that party.
Eh. As a person directly affected – I am a white person who used to buy “normal” shampoo – I can still buy default shampoo. I don’t need to buy “shampoo for _____”, the one labeled “shampoo” works great. I haven’t lost that privilege. I did spend 15 minutes, and however much a bottle of shampoo costs, to find a new shampoo when the label changed, though. As i said above, not NEARLY as bad as when i bought a box of what I expected to be delicious cookies and they tasted like blecchh canola oil, not like coconut and palm oil. The cookies cost more, and I didn’t realize at the store that I ought to have picked up some other kind of cookie. But the cost to me is not that I’ve lost my privileged position, but just that I needed to read some labels to find a new shampoo.
Anyone who thinks they are losing privilege because of this has no clue what it feels like to lack privilege.
^^I had to do the same thing (i.e., take a few minutes to figure out which shampoo to get when my usual brand dropped the “normal.” I had walked in to stock up and I saw “for oily hair” and “dry hair,” but I couldn’t find the “normal” one. So I grabbed one that didn’t specify for oily hair or dry hair as I figured that was the kind I needed.