21 May

Stop force-feeding me

When I was young, my mum tried any which way to get me to like cauliflower; hiding it in things (cauliflower cheese being the obvious one), doing ‘here comes the aeroplane’, telling me it would ‘make me strong’ – more so than the green stuff.

It didn’t work. I couldn’t be fooled. I hated the stuff – devil’s food.

To this day, I still don’t like cauliflower. You couldn’t force it into my mouth any more than you could force in the phrase ‘that Maplin feeling’.
This is a phrase I heard in a TV ad last night; ‘y’know that Maplin feeling?’ (in the foreground, a man had just discovered he had the wrong lead for his TV).
No – I don’t know ‘that Maplin feeling’.

I don’t know that feeling any more than I know of a ‘Nescafe dilemma’ if I run out of coffee, or have a ‘Mercedes craving’ if my dodgy Ford Fiesta breaks down.

I’ve said this before, but people – out in the real world – just don’t talk like that. Consumers (the target of adverts) are people.
We don’t squeeze brand names awkwardly into the middle of our conversations; ‘Shit, I’ve dropped stuff all over the floor – this feels like a Dyson situation’… said no-one, ever.

This type of insult-to-the-intelligence advertising died out in the 1920s, when TV adverts were new and consumers were considered to be gullible morons.
It sounds horrendous now.

Your customers are humans. Talk to them in a way that shows you’re aware of this.
Don’t force-feed them crap that would never come out of their mouths.

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