If you are trying to come up with a slogan for an ad campaign you have to decide how picky you are going to be with the grammar.  For example suppose that there is a grammatical and a more colloquial way to write your slogan.  Which do you go with?

Your audience has grammar snobs and regular people.  Whichever way you write your slogan it’s going to look natural to one group and un-natural to the other.  And the group that stumbles over the syntax is going to be at least somewhat distracted from the message.  You have this problem whether you decide to bend toward the grammar snobs or the regular people.

But one thing tips the balance in favor of the ungrammatical slogan.  In advertising, you are looking for anything that gets your audience to stop and spin some brain cycles in the presence of your ad. You will smuggle in your brand alongside. You get this benefit only with the ungrammatical.  The grammar snobs, annoyed with your slogan are programmed to turn it over, diagram it and correct it.  In effect you will cause them to construct variations of your ad campaign inside their own heads.

This is a good thing.  Never mind that they will curse you for your trespasses. There’s no such thing as bad publicity.  Indeed you hope for their curses. Nothing could be better than having them shout from the rooftops all the ways that your slogan, the one that urges everyone to buy your product, should be rewritten in order to make it more palatable.

Here’s a previous post on krafty konstructions.

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