Marketing
A wine tasting stall
in a supermarket –
an unexpected taste,
no more. If you want more, buy a bottle.
Or when colour TV
first came on the scene, and everyone was fascinated
to see this treasure
for themselves, rental companies surprised us with a free first week.
They knew of course
that people who would not pay to hire a TV, would pay not to have to
return it.
In designing a name or
a one-line personality for a new product or concept,
we need to arouse and then keep the attention
we have aroused.
One method much in vogue at present
is the use of
oxymorons,
seeming
self-contradictory names and phrases.
The first word(s) sets
up the expectation of a range of possible
next words, but what
you get is something way outside that range.
Examples include adverts for Sony Walkman – ‘hi-fi sound in your head’;
‘Widget’
beers - ‘draught beer’ in a can; Persil - the ‘loving’ detergent’.
How
can you have hifi sound in your head? How
can
you have draught beer in a can?
How
can a detergent
be
loving??
An
ambiguity opens.
They
are not allowed to lie, so it must be true,
but
it can’t be true.
A
Secret.
They
have our attention,
while
the memes (the message) are transferred.
(Thanks
to Virginia Valentine of Semiotic Solutions for these examples,
and her definition of myth in semiotics: a
logical model capable
of
reconciling two previously contradictory oppositions’.)
Rushkoff also
describes this process in “Media Virus”:
“The
virus began with the carefully conceived phrase “smart drugs”.
Like
many of the media viruses… virtual reality, techno-shamanism, ecological
terrorism –
smart
drugs is an oxymoron. By juxtaposing two words or ideas that do not normally go
together,
the
phrase demands thought: “Drugs are smart?” Using a hypnosis
technique
first developed by Milton Erickson,
the
contradictory phrase creates its own unique conceptual slot
in
the minds of people who hear it.
The
longer the phrase demands conscious attention,
the more opportunity the virus has to inject
its memes.
If
it makes us think, then we cannot be immune to it.”
The concept of smart
drugs
was used to enthral audiences with the idea
that we could take
substances that would enhance
our intelligence and
our learning abilities… if the government
were denied some of
its powers to restrict such drugs.
And once attention was
gained, on talk shows, etc
–
the main message, the main meme of the
‘virus’,
–
was transferred to the audience.
That there were drugs
that could save millions of lives
drugs which were being suppressed by the system.
Drugs which the drug companies were not allowed to release
without exhaustive testing, but would not test, because testing
cost a fortune, and the returns would not cover this cost
for those drugs for which the patent would soon end.
The process is of
course, not new.
In the choice of
titles for books,
for example, as Kevin
Johnson notes of John O’Hara
in his ‘Invisible
Forms’ (Picador, 1999)*
“one way to arrive at
a haunting title is to juxtapose
two simple words in an
unexpected way, as he did for his own novel,
‘A Rage to Live.’
(p.6-7) Other titles mentioned in his eponymous chapter
also fall into this
category – ‘The Shores of Light’, ‘The Triple Thinkers’,
‘Beyond Culture’, ‘The
Bonfire of the Vanities’, ‘Lord of the Flies’,
‘The Name of the
Rose’, ‘From Russia with Love’, ‘Back to the Future’
or ‘This Fish is
Loaded’.
We will say lots more
about Titles, but for now, vat shallot.
