Fun Online Polls: Storm names, advertising and shaving.

The results to last week's poll were as follows:

Which was your favourite storm name so far? (Multiple choices allowed)
Abigail - 3 votes
Barney - 0 votes
Clodagh - 2 votes
Desmond - 0 votes
Eva - 0 votes
Frank - 2 votes
Gertrude fka Jonas - 3 votes
Henry - 0 votes
None. The practice is very silly - 80 votes

Lighten up, people!
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I watch a fair amount of telly and hence a fair amount of advertising.

The old rule is that there is no point advertising a completely generic product like potatoes or sugar. People will probably buy them anyway, and if one farmer/producer reminds people how great his potatoes are, at best people will buy more potatoes, but they are just as likely to buy somebody else's. So it is only industry-wide organisations who would pay for it.

At the other extreme are products which are totally unique to the producer, they don't really need to be advertised either. If you need that product, you will buy it from the sole supplier, so Rolls Royce don't need to advertise their cars.

Most advertising seems to be for companies/products in the middle ground - cars, banks, online betting, price comparison sites - these are all much of a muchness, they are generic products but with some market segmentation.

- If you buy Car X, you will need to buy replacement parts for it in future. This overlaps with Indian Bicycle Marketing - cars are marketed as manly cars, girly cars, family cars, hipster cars and middle aged cars.
- If you open an account with Bank X, then you are unlikely to switch accounts for several years;
- If you have opened an online betting account with your "free £10 to play", you are likely to stick with them for while (or at least until you have lost more than your "free £10 to play"); and
- Price comparison sites. If you can get more customers, you get more advertisers, which means more customers etc.

Something else which irks is the amount of advertising for disposable razors. There's Gillette and Wilkinson's, who have been locked in mortal combat since the dawn of time (like Coca Cola and Pepsi Cola) with increasing outlandish claims.

Since The Onion spoof from 2004, Fuck Everything, We're Doing Five Blades, they really did go to five blades or here. On the other hand, you see relatively little advertising for dry/electric shavers.

I assume it's because people replace them so seldom, but it might be that it's only a very small market share and most people use disposables.

So that's what I need to find out: "Do you use a dry/electric shaver or disposables?"

Vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

For the record, I tried disposables briefly when I was a teenager, hated it (rash, cuts etc) and have used an electric shaver ever since.