Why be “normal?” That is the question, as marketers shun the term

The NPC Healthbiz Weekly will keep informing you through 2021 because it's what we do. It's your weekly briefing on topics pertinent to healthcare marketers and executives. Proudly published in cooperation with Peak Pharma Solutions. 

⇒ Issue #170 (In numerology, 170 signifies being in charge of both your personal and business life.)

⇒ Worldwide Covid cases as of 03/11: 118,129,308*

⇒ Worldwide Covid fatalities as of 03/11: 2,621,986*

⇒ Confirmed Covid cases in Canada as of 03/11: 902,234*
⇒ Confirmed Covid fatalities in Canada as of 03/11: 22,330*

⇒ Number of vaccine doses administered to Canadians as of 03/11: 2,621,289*

March 11, 2021—Good morning, CurveFlatteners, and welcome to the tail-end of Week 52 of our collective experiment in normalizing unaccustomed behaviours. It’s Mitch Shannon at the keyboard today, and let’s agree to pretend that I didn’t just use the phrase “normal.” That’s not an acceptable term anymore.

Unilever, the UK-based maker of prosaic skincare brands such as Vaseline and Dove, this week banned the expression “normal” from its product packaging and promotion, following a survey of 10,000 consumers in nine countries. The company found seven out of 10 people thought the term has negative connotations and is exclusionary. Unilever has more than 200 products that contain “normal” as part of the brand or package. 

According to Sunny Jain, Unilever’s prexy for personal care: “We know that removing ‘normal’ from our products and packaging will not fix the problem alone, but it is an important step forward.”

A noisy corporate rejection of the previous concept of “normal” may be an emerging part of what CPO Magazine defines as the “next normal.” The post-Covid economy, the magazine recently reported, will be designated as a “fourth industrial revolution” marked by machine learning and adoption of advanced technologies, supply chain reinvention, and an emphasis on improved data security. Driving the economy will be “revenge spending,” defined as pent-up demand for indulgences that were suppressed during the Covid age, including discretionary travel, in-person shopping, and the purchase of small luxury items. 

Readers who might find themselves a tad wistful about the earlier notions of normality may take comfort in knowing that the Old Normal never really existed, anyway. In Psychology Today, Peter Kramer’s 2009 article pointed out that the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-V criteria designate more than half the population of North America as having, or previously experiencing, some designated form of psychiatric disorder essentially categorizes “normal” as, well, abnormal. 

This is consistent with recent reports that the more excitable advisers in the former Trump White House openly mocked their stoic, level-headed colleagues, admittedly a minority, with the derogatory term, “Normies.”

So, it’s adieu, then, to all surviving Normies. We’ll miss seeing you around the No Frills stores, Canadian Tire gas bars, and Swiss Chalets. Before you go, do have one last listen to your Normal-person's anthem to accompany your exit, stage right.

The NPC Podcast is back for another season. The National Pharmaceutical Congress organizers are proud to release our new weekly podcast series, hosted by Peter Brenders. Peter's guest this week is Paul Petrelli, general manager of Jazz Pharmaceuticals. The NPC Podcast is proudly presented in cooperation with Impres Pharma

COVID CHRONICLE 03/11/2021

• Medical colleagues may have certain points of reasonable disagreement concerning clinical affairs: These are referred to as controversies. But there’s got to be a separate category for Dr. Kulvinder Kaur Gill. She’s a Brampton, Ont. pediatrician who has been cautioned once, twice, and now three times by the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ontario concerning her unorthodox tweets about Covid-19. Dr. Gill, prexy and co-founder of the group Concerned Ontario Doctors, has used Twitter to denounce lockdowns, promote hydroxychloroquine, and discourage vaccination, all of which prompted complaints to the college. She has re-tweeted posts supporting the quack Covid remedy from accused American insurrectionist Dr. Simone Gold (see CurveFlattener #158.) The College found her tweets didn’t “provide any evidence to support her statement indicating that a vaccine is not necessary.”
  
• When your mobile phone company drops a call, the usual thing is to shrug and redial. However, the Western Canadian telecom giant Telus dropped too many calls to ignore this week, and the thing is, they were all supposed to go to a call centre set up to hand bookings for Covid-19 vaccine appointments in the Vancouver health region. Telus boss Darren Entwistle snivelled a response: “The provincial government and health authorities asked us to support them, and we have let them down. We can and will do better, and we will make this right.” He plans to hire more agents. B.C. Health Minister Adrian Dix seems disinclined to shrug off the failure. Said he: “Telus failed us yesterday. For that failure, a lot of people wasted time, and I think lost some confidence in the system — confidence that we’ll have to work hard to rebuild at every level in terms of both technical issues that affected all health authorities and staffing issues.” Boy, did they ever get the wrong number.
  
  
• Dr. Barbara Rumain and colleagues are challenging the belief that adolescents and young adults (aged 10 to 24 years) are less susceptible to Covid-19 than older adults. Their examination of data during the summer of 2020, just published in the online journal PLOS ONE, indicates the potential for high transmission among adolescents and youth, which, the researchers say, should be factored into school reopening decisions. They recommend public health messaging targeting adolescents and youth. Dr. Rumaine is a member of the pediatrics department at New York Medical College.

TODAY CHRONICLE IS WORKING ON 

We're getting closer to National Close the Gap Day, one week from today, next Thursday, March 18. The day is designated as a time to express support for Canada's Indigenous communities and acknowledge the large disparities in the healthcare provided to First Nations, Metis and Inuit people. There will be a full-page ad in this Saturday's National Post, prepared by Chronicle, so check it out. Go to www.closethegap.xyz to learn more. The Indigenous Skin Spectrum Summit is the cornerstone event of Close the Gap Day, and you can learn more about the Summit here. 

RIGHT NOW I'M READING... 

I'm a confessed admirer of the fiction of contemporary American novelist Don Winslow. In fact, there's a poster advertising his novel Savages, autographed by the author, within arm's length of my laptop as I peck out these words. He's a master of 21st-century noir and rightly regarded as the successor to the late Elmore Leonard in the noir genre. Isle of Joy is a hard-to-find early work published back in 1996, and it's entirely unlike his current, more formulaic stuff. His plot depicts a retired CIA operative in 1958 Manhattan. The book is an uncharacteristically big-hearted paean to an evocative place and time in the writer's early youth, and mine. He concocts plausible stand-ins for the Kennedys, Jack Kerouac, Marilyn Monroe, and other giants of a bygone era. One striking chapter recounts literal Giants, the NFL team of '58 cast in a grudge match against the Baltimore Colts, featuring Pat Summerall, Johnny Unitas, Gino Marchetti, Big Daddy Liscombe and other immortals. This might just be Winslow's strongest and most enjoyable work, and it occurs to me that this is as good a piece of writing as I've picked up post-lockdown and one that needs to be celebrated.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW

Your CurveFlattener returns tomorrow with Kylie Rebernik in charge. Stay safe and be good until we see you again.