Santa's basic yule tide rule of thumb: if it looks like it could be trouble then put it on the naughty list and hide it away.
Meanwhile Procter & Gamble has paid the price of focusing on minor brand extensions, seeking approval from the Status Quo police for products like Tide Basic, Charmin Basic and Bounty Basic.
It recently released Tide Basic, which costs around a fifth less than its more upmarket cousin.
Will the copywriters at Saatchi & Saatchi creating advertising for the coming test of Tide Basic — a version of Tide detergent, sold by Procter & Gamble, that will cost 20percentt less than standard Tide — be able to resist using slogans like "Basic will Tide you over till the recession is over"?
Some services may help you out with basic items to tide you over until your luggage arrives; this is more likely to be the case with airlines and not so with a bus service.
P&G launched a less expensive "basic" version of its Tide brand of washing powder, but then withdrew it because it was too popular.
And Procter is testing, in three Southern states, a version of Tide called Tide Basic, that costs about 20 percent less than the mainstay versions.
"The basic assumption was that the tide would not go out," says John Lanchester, "and the thing that astonished the world of money and caused the credit crunch - in fact it was the credit crunch - was the fact that the tide went out everywhere simultaneously".
Apart from the basic understanding of how the "tide and ebb" of metabolite flow is related to growth and death of bacteria, one of the major thrusts for carrying out dynamic modeling is to identify vulnerable drug targets.
All of which just increases the likelihood that what comes out will be remarkably non-innovative, like reducing the dirt-removing strength in Tide, slapping the word Basic on it, lowering the price and calling the result an innovation.
