In 1990 I had a wonderful holiday in Thailand and although it was a 16 hour flight, both the people and the scenery were fantastic! I did however notice that most of what were sold in stores and on the streets are would we would refer to as “knock offs” You could get almost anything from the famous Rolex fakes to all manner of CDs and tapes, all of which were copies of originals.
One definition of a “knock off” is
“Goods produced with the intent to take advantage of the established worth of the previous product”
It occurs to me that just as there are physical goods that fall into this category, there are also numerous attempts to take advantage of well known brands in the world of changework, where simply adding a prefix to an existing well known therapy then tries to generate attention as if this were a new approach.
This practice is increasingly more common in the worlds of NLP and Hypnosis where a lot of selling training courses has become best described as pyramid selling with little regard to quality. Fortunately there are some skills based trainings around, but many of the big events focus more on cash generation than skill generation.
As for "knock offs" in the training arena, I groaned today when I saw a person attempt to link together “Hypnosis” and “Provocative” to recycle some very old ideas now with the usual rubber stamped “genius type” endorsement from a “big NLP name”. Of course Provocative Therapy was created by Frank Farrelly and this in my view is a blatant attempt to capitalize on this therapy with what appears to be a Frankenstein like mix of NLP techniques with a lack of duty of care towards clients. Provocative does not equate to “aggressive” and I can’t help thinking that the promoter of this “knock off” may have been better advised to call his approach “aggressive hypnosis”
In the world of music this behaviour also occurs with some bands imitating others to the nth degree. I remember hearing the form Marillion album and thinking it was almost an exact clone of previous Genesis and other albums. (Before you ask no I am not a Marillion fan!)
Fortunately most “knock off therapies” have a very short shelf life and then disappear without trace for good. (Except Marillion, who are still apparently doing rather well by embracing fan power on the internet?)
Ultimately just as with car boot sales many such knock off vendors then resurface as burger salesmen or in the world of change work, return to working in Car phone Warehouse or other such employers where at least they have to adhere to some quality of customer care...
Posts
