S.M. Jaleel may seem like small potatoes. After all, this little beverage producer operates out of Trinidad and Tobago and Barbados, and its flagship brand has a deformed endomorph for a mascot. But there's something remarkable about the kids running this Third-World would-be megacorporation — they're learning from American business.
They've got a mission statement: to be the leading manufacturer and the
lowest cost producer in the Caribbean of quality flavoured soft drinks, packaged in P.E.T.
They've got a vision: to establish CHUBBY as a global brand.
And they've got a product: some of the world's weirdest soft drinks.
This last statement is not value-neutral. Anyone raised on Mountain Dew clearly has no right to criticize the soft drinks of other nations for being unnatural or bizarre. But CHUBBY beverages come in flavors like guarana, pineapple and sorrel, and they're based on sugar, rather than corn syrup, giving them a taste that is bizarrely cloying and intense to an American palate.
Ah, for the graceful simplicity of Crystal Pepsi.
But from the amazing profusion of American business jargon that clutters the S.M. Jaleel website, to the intense pride it takes in expanding its line of beverages to countries across the developing world it becomes clear that S.M. Jaleel is truly The Little Company That Could.
Its success has been acheived by pursuing a marketing strategy that explains itself better than any sarcastic bracketing phrase ever could:
"Launched in September 1993, CHUBBY is first carbonated soft drink to be developed and targeted specifically at children under the age of 12. Its success has been phenomenal. By 1994, CHUBBY had become the largest selling carbonated soft drink amongst children in the Caribbean region."
CHUBBY's mascot, the imaginatively named "Mr. CHUBBY," wears "brightly-coloured clothes and a trendy yellow cap," and is touted on the Jaleel website as reflecting the "loveable, jolly and playful qualities which kids easily identify with and accept."
A quick review of Mr. CHUBBY's actual qualities reveals the following:
Mr. CHUBBY is a grotesquely obese, poorly-rendered dwarf. The combined effect of his semi-circular smile and raised eyebrows makes him appear as though he's just offered to "take care of your wife" while you're on vacation.
Mr. CHUBBY's blue pants are essentially obscured his enormous red shirt, which in turn conceals a rippling mass of pasty-white flesh.
Mr. CHUBBY's company proudly boasts of being pioneers in the field of producing enormous amounts of plastic bottles: "the bottles are produced from resin and filled on-line, in one continuous process, at speeds exceeding 40,000 bottles per hour."
Mr. CHUBBY, therefore, is overweight, greedy, not particularly environmentally conscious and poorly dressed. We have met Mr. CHUBBY, and he is us. We have met S.M. Jaleel, and it is a plain-English, poor man's version of an American corporation, touting its own excellence, boasting of its plans to expand its product to the far ends of the Earth, and producing a product none of us really need. To wit: this would-be corporate monster is spraying out tens of thousands of gallons of sugar water spiked with a modicum of flavor.
Of course, the sins of S.M. Jaleel, whatever they may be, surely pale before the hilarious bumblings of companies like Archer Daniels Midland, Exxon, or the odiously evil PepsiCo, whose Burmese slave domes can never be erased from the world's conscience. But it's a bit sad to imagine that in every developing nation, companies like S.M. Jaleel are taking their lead from American companies and rampaging down their own little warpaths of expansion without limits. Even if American companies ever get their environmental and social acts together, we'll have a new problem on our hands: all those companies in the outside world that have followed our example, instead of listening to our sermon.
— James Norton (jim@flakmag.com)
