When marketing your services to the public, you need to be careful about any analogies or other types of references in your materials. What you might think of as being benign, could have a negative effect on your audience.
Case in point: I was listening to a radio station whose market is eastern Long Island when a commercial from an insurance broker ran. The broker's argument for doing business with it is that the consumer should not do business with an out of the area company that thought Robert Moses wrote the 10 Commandments.
The unfortunate reference here is to Robert Moses, who remains a controversial figure in New York State even though his power base disappeared approximately 40 years ago.
In some quarters, Moses is remembered fondly for his creation of many state parks (a park and bridge on Long Island are named after him) and other public works. But many New Yorkers (and I am one of them), whatever good he did was more than wiped out by what his actions and beliefs did to many neighborhoods; there are those who think he was deity-like in his actions. The most important of those beliefs was to build limited-access roads across the region instead of developing mass transit.
For example, the social ills of the South Bronx can be directly attributed to Moses' insistence on the path of the Cross Bronx Expressway.
The Rockaways, the beachfront community where I live, had its boardwalk amusement area destroyed by Moses, who wanted to build a series of parkways across the south shore of Long Island.
And to Brooklyn Dodger fans, if Walter O'Malley was Public Enemy No. 1, he was Public Enemy No. 2 for refusing to allow the team to move from Ebbets Field to a site near the Long Island Rail Road terminal at Atlantic Ave. Moses wanted a stadium in Queens in an area surrounded by highways, where eventually Shea Stadium and, later, Citi Field were constructed. (In another irony, O'Malley's Brooklyn site is where Bruce Ratner is building the arena that will become home to the New Jersey Nets.)
This is not intended to be a rant about Robert Moses, but to give people some background on why I considered this an unfortunate marketing reference.
It is important when creating your marketing materials that they not include any statements that could anger your target audience. A mortgage example of that (albeit an exaggerated one, I admit) is to call yourself the best subprime originator of the last 20 years. It turns off a large segment of your audience (although you will find a fair number of people who did benefit from subprime lending, the overall connotation is not a good one).
