Gauge How A Company is Doing by Using Verbs and Adjectives

We’re in a recession. Can’t you smell the desperation in the air? If you want to tell which companies aren’t doing so hot by simply perusing one of their products, count the number of adjectives. The more adjectives, the more debt the company has. A company goes through a verb phrase before they unconsciously turn to adjectives to save them.

Photo Courtesy of dwstucke from Flickr

Verbs: they are not anyone’s friend right now.

• Verbs have begin sprouting on my bobby pin labels; “Dream, Imagine, Create”. After researching Conair (the maker of said bobby pins) I discovered that they are going out of business. Because I bought these bobby pins some time back, I searched through other Conair labels and saw a massive increase in adjectives shortly after the spike in verbs,  a tell tale sign of a tanking company.
• Another example of the rule “more verbs = more desperation” is “Pilot”, a pen company based mostly in Japan but also sells in the U.S. and I found some interesting data. A week ago I bought some pens from them- “Easy Touch Retractable”. See? We’re all ready in trouble here. This cover is full of verbs- “Feel me!”, “Retractable Ball Point Pen”, “Refillable”, and even “Made in USA” which I find ironic because even though it’s made in the U.S. it’s a Japan based company. This company is inching into the full blown adjective stage, although it’s still in the troubled verb stage. But I bet it will, and it’s sales will decline also. Here is a page that illustrates my point.

Adjectives = Defeat

• Wrigleys: After a company goes through the verb phase and begin descending into the darkness of company sales failure, we see those verbs get replaced by strange adjectives and equally strange color schemes. Take 5 Gum, for instance. Owned by Wrigley, this product started out with flavor names such as “Rain” and “Flare”, but as it’s stock dropped those verbs disappeared and the company gave into a new flavor that is yellow and named “Lush” with the tagline “…a crisp tropical”. As things got tough, color schemes, names and taglines incorporated more confusing adjectives. And why isn’t it green if it’s supposed to  be tropical? After all, I think they’re trying to get at a “lush” rain forest.
• Conair: As mentioned above, the Conair company went through their verb stage many months previous to this article, when I bought bobby pins. Their adjective phase was a horrendous thing. Straighteners became “Ionic”, hairdryers became “Infiniti Ionic Hair Styler” with a tag line of “Tourmaline ceramic ionic technology”… do I have to continue?

In short, companies place a lot of verbs on their labels as financial troubles begin, and when those verbs get replaced by adjectives their financial troubles have escalated. Count the number of verbs and adjectives to gauge when to buy and sell a company’s stock or to just discover how they’re doing.

-Rika