From Cannon Fodder To Preferred Tenderer
The term "cannon fodder" derives from the World Wars and refers to the massing of undertrained and recently recruited troops sent to the fronts to face the enemy. Such troops invariably had a poor survival rate but provided the tactical advantage of distracting the enemy while professional soldiers mounted more effective operations. In adopting the term to Industrial Marketing it means those bids being submitted that have no chance of winning but are involved to make up the numbers (you can't have only one bid in a "competitive" tender process; that wouldn't satisfy the requirements of probity) (for example in government tenders, or for private enterprise the requirement to "truly test the market" and to "keep them honest"). The reader might be wondering why anybody would go to all of the work of submitting a tender when they had no chance of winning; for the same reason that troops were sent in to battle to die; they thought they had a real chance.
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Famous quotes containing the words cannon and/or preferred:
“The cannon thunders ... limbs fly in all directions ... one can hear the groans of victims and the howling of those performing the sacrifice ... it’s Humanity in search of happiness.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“San Francisco is where gay fantasies come true, and the problem the city presents is whether, after all, we wanted these particular dreams to be fulfilled—or would we have preferred others? Did we know what price these dreams would exact? Did we anticipate the ways in which, vivid and continuous, they would unsuit us for the business of daily life? Or should our notion of daily life itself be transformed?”
—Edmund White (b. 1940)