Ok! Everybody! Sing!
🎶 I’d like to buy the world a Coke, and keep it company.
🎶 I dont want to grow up, I’m a Toys “R” Us kid!
🎶 Have it your way! Have it your way! Have it your way at Burger King!
🎶 Who wears short shorts? We wear short shorts!
🎶 Plop, plop, fizz, fizz, oh what a relief it is!
Imagine owning a jingle virtually your entire customer base can hum and will associate with that with which you wish it to be associated. Now imagine that is has the shelf life of Spam. The consumable meat-substance, not the email.
This is your +5 elven sword. This is a widget in Batman’s belt. This is Harry Potter’s wand. If you are a marketer and you write such a ditty about the right product, at the right time, and you watch it rise into the heavens and penetrate and take permanent root in the collective mind, well, this is your Sgt. York moment. In your world, this is your Congressional Medal of Honor.
Now let’s say that you wrote your little concerto in olden times and in it you used the N-word. Now, back then it sold the widget that it was associated with like hotcakes. Of course you pulled the ditty a long time ago but dadburnit your research tells you that even amongst 22-25 year olds 85% can immediately finish humming it if given the first four notes. But frack and flibgiblets! 70% remember the words!
That’s quite a grenade to have in your bandolier and not be able to use. What to do!? Hrmmmm.
Well, what if you could replace the N-word with another innocuous word? Let’s consider a case study.
🎶 Ace is the place with the helpful hardware [M-word].
I recently saw an Ace commercial where they have resurrected this old lyric replacing the M-word with folks. Folks is in fact currently inoffensive but I keep hearing the M-word in my head and becoming very offended and angry with Ace for their past misogyny.
No, I dont think it can be done. Your old ditty that includes the N-word needs to stay in ditty-purgatory (which is where you’re headed for writing it!) and likewise Ace’s. And Ace Hardware needs to be boycotted for resurfacing in our heads the ignorance that they embedded there when we were but wee bairns. As if M-word (plural) are particularly associated with hardware!
Great! Now I’m angry. Curse you Ace Hardware! Dang your hide!
M.C. Atkins
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Look Away... 