From: Louis Patterson <lrp@ecr.mu.oz.au>
Newsgroups: alt.humor.best-of-usenet
Subject: [aus.tv] The Logic that John West rejects
Date: 19 Oct 1997 17:49:13 GMT

[Submitter's note: The fish john west reject is a fairly long running
ad campaign here in Oz. The ads all follow the same basic structure;
someone selling apparently good-quality fish loses a sale when it is
revealed that the fish were rejected by john west...]

Subject: The Logic that John West rejects
From: Bill Lee <billlee@asia.apple.com>
Newsgroups: aus.tv

Just today while watching TV, I saw the latest advertisement for John West
fish products, namely Salmon.  In it they had an American Indian or Eskimo
character calling a seller of "fish that JW rejected" dumb (presumably for
trying to sell fish of that quality).

The problem is that I would have thought that JW would be trying to
convince us that the quality of the fish that JW has rejected is high, with
the implication that JW's standards are even higher. This would be shown in
the first diagram below. This would be more in line with one of their
earlier ads that had the "consumer" saying that the fish merchants' product
looked OK, but being told that however good it looked, it was not up to
the high standards of JW.

    High +-------------------------------------------------------+
         |     The set of fish that JW is trying to convince     |
     Q   |        us that it considers worthy of its name.       |
     U   +-------------------------------------------------------+
     A   | (High quality JW rejects)                             |
     L   |                                                       |
     I   |                                                       |
     T   |     You gotta be dumb to buy fish of this quality     |
     Y   |                                                       |
         |                                                       |
         | (Low quality JW rejects)                              |
    Low  +-------------------------------------------------------+

Instead, we are treated to an ad campaign that seems to say that the
JW-rejected fish that the vendor has tried to sell is a dumb idea.
If it is a dumb idea, then there is an implication that the product
can't be any good (otherwise why would it be a 'dumb' idea?).
This does nothing to further the idea that JW has high standards,
as shown in the diagram below:


    High +-------------------------------------------------------+
         | (High quality JW fish)                                |
     Q   |                                                       |
     U   |         The set of fish that JW is trying to          |
     A   |         convince us that it considers worthy          |
     L   |                    of its name.                       |
     I   |                                                       |
     T   |                                                       |
     Y   | (Low quality JW fish)                                 |
         +-------------------------------------------------------+
         | You gotta be dumb to try to sell fish of this quality |
    Low  +-------------------------------------------------------+

So, did the idea of a humerous ad overcome logic?  Is their
expectation that the humor will sell the product despite the logic?