I’m highly annoying to go shopping with. As someone who works with marketing every day, I obsessively examine marketing I see in the real world. On Saturday, my friend Crystal and I had an all day shopping trip and she discovered this first hand. I spent the entire day snapping pictures of both good and bad product names and advertising on my cell phone.
However, the worst example that I saw was also the one I understood the most. Here, for your viewing pleasure, I present:
This is a “Hayride” scented room spray. Now, while you’re all laughing and shaking your head, this wasn’t as out of place as you’d think. I found this at a local store that specializes in farmhouse style decor, and so the name went with the theme of the place. It was with several other room sprays, all of which had equally romantic but misplaced names.
Now, sometimes you see terrible product names and think, “Man, what idiot came up with that?” But in this case, I can completely imagine how this product ended up with this name. So today I wanted to write about it as a case study, since it’s illustrative of a really large problem in both copywriting and marketing these days. Romantic names and imagery don’t always conjure up romantic ideas.
Now, romantic marketing(both in the love sense and the get back to nature sense) are really popular in marketing and copywriting. They always have been. The reason is easy to explain: they work. As people, and especially as Americans, we’ve always had a desire to live a nice clean country lifestyle that popular culture presents. Romantic terms and imagery can be used really effectively: in fact, I just wrote a bunch of romance based copy this past week that sold things like crazy for my client. But, like anything in marketing, you need to choose your words carefully: the implications of the words you use are even more important than the first impression they give.
Now, the person who designed this product was clearly thinking of the history of hayrides in popular culture. In popular culture, hayrides are romantic, clean, innocent, and starry-eyed. But here’s the problem: anyone who has ever been on a hayride knows that this is a bunch of bullshit.
When I found the product, I showed it to Crystal, and asked her what the word “hayride” made her think of. She shuddered, and then replied, “Itchy.” I would bet real money that this is a popular answer. I would also bet money on alternative answers being “smelly”, “crowded”, “freezing cold”, and “uncomfortable”. None of these are things that you want your room spray to be associated with. Especially smelly.
The truth is, we see this a lot in advertising. And we marketing people spend a lot of time advertising with images that are idealistic, rather than realistic. After all, idealism sells. It has for years, and it will for years to come. However, if you’re going to go that route, make sure that you think it all through. What you think of when you’re drafting an ad or a product image may be totally different than what the customer instinctively thinks of when they pick up the product on the other end. In this case, romantic and clean becomes smelly and itchy. Words have power: in many cases, the real power is in the things they imply. This is the wonderful part of writing and working with them, but can also be a curse when you’re using them to market something. When you use words to evoke images, make sure you think through the implications of that image as well.
The ultimate irony of this was that the actual spray smelled really good: mostly like lavender. If it hadn’t been for the name, I would have bought some.
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