Boardroom Suggestion

Confirmed 796,052

About

Boardroom Suggestion is an exploitable comic series satirizing the perception gap between what consumers want and what corporate executives think they want, in similar vein of Corporate Logic and All Right, Gentlemen comics. Each comic begins with the executive consulting his staff for new product ideas, followed by the first two employees giving corporate-safe answers, which ends abruptly with the third employee being thrown out of the window for suggesting a consumer-approved idea.

Origin

The original comic titled "Outlook Oust" was posted on the webcomic site Hejibits^[1] on December 24th, 2012, which depicted a Nintendo boardroom meeting about features included on the Wii U console (shown below).

Spread

The comic initially spread out on the site Joystiq World,^[2] which linked to Hejibits on December 29th, 2012. On Reddit's /r/4chan subreddit, redditor Bluestalker^[3] submitted a link on January 5th, 2013^[4] of a collection of screenshots from a draw thread on 4chan's /b/ board that started on January 3rd, 2013, which contained over three hundred replies containing approximately one hundred variations of the comic.^[5] Besides, redditor pogopenis^[6] submitted an edited version of the original Hejibits comic to the /r/funny subreddit on the same day,^[7] which depicted an MTV executive consulting his boardroom about new ideas for shows on the cable television network (shown below, left). Within nine days, the post received over 7,500 up votes and 195 comments. On January 7th, Pixel Car World Forums member Ye Olde F-F posted a thread inviting members to create custom versions of the comic.^[8]

On January 11th, the Cheezburger site Memebase^[9] highlighted a comic in which several snack food companies discuss ways to improve their products (shown above, right). Within four days, the post received over 245 up votes and 180 Facebook shares. On January 14th, the "Board Suggesstion Memes" Facebook^[10] page was created, which featured notable examples of the exploitable comic. Within 24 hours, the page received over 4,400 likes.

Extended and Reversed Versions

On February 23rd, 2013, Can I Haz Cheezburger user Whiteoverblue posted an extended version of the comic in which the boss doesn't throw the employee out of the window and follows his suggestion instead (shown below, left).^[11] The post gained over 2000 upvotes on the site in six years. The extended version of the comic saw limited used in memes until June, 2019.^[12]^[13] On June 19th, 2019, Redditor AidanOrsargos used the extended version of the comic for a meme posted to /r/dankmemes^[14] and /r/MemeEconomy^[15] subreddits (shown below, center left), with the posts receiving over 48,500 and 230 upvotes, respectively. In the following days, another edit based on the format has been posted,^[16] with a blank template also made.^[17]

On June 20th, AidanOrsagos posted a reversed version of the comic to /r/bonehurtingjuice^[18] and /r/memes^[19] subreddits subreddits, gaining over 27,900 and 36,600 upvotes, respectively, with this version also seeing edits in the following days.

Additionally, the posts prompted an influx in the amount of memes based on the original template.