Advertising

My word-dork self occasionally is overcome by advertisement.

No word’s meaning is ever stationary, and I love to trace how meaning gathers and morphs around a particular word. Advertising inverts this—exploiting the meanings that surround words and phrases to invoke associations, related to the product or not, that could create a desire you might act on.

A couple days ago, someone had left an Herbal Essences conditioner in the yoga showers. It was one of those conditioners that’s supposed to keep your hair from splitting. It used the word “break” three times on the front (and verbage really was pretty sparse—it’s a conditioner bottle after all, not a PSA).

1. “Break’s Over”. This apparently is the name of the conditioner. What does this call up? End of lunch break, getting back to work, standing back up after resting, cigarette breaks, chop chop, Labor Day, union negotiations
2. “with an anti-breakage potion and a fusion of coco mango & pearls”. What? Other than not knowing that pearls could be mixed with fruit and “infused” into a bottle with water and oil, what can this possibly mean? But it does sound vaguely romantic, moonlit, and luxurious.
3. “a love potion for bad hair break-ups”. Note the repetition of “potion”. How do we get from “break’s over” to “break-ups” in just 4 inches of violet-blue bottle? What do girlfriend-boyfriend sagas, heartbreak, unaware teenagers, love hocus-pocus, fighting, and relationship drama, broadly defined, have to do with getting back to work, pearls, or hair products?

Does it matter that these three phrases are unequally insane? That the unrelated free associations these phrases are designed to elicit have nothing to do with hair? That the premise of the persuasion is not argument but successful manipulation of our average mental drivel?

Probably not, and certainly Herbal Essences conditioner isn’t the place to start a war on the perversion of advertising. Other propaganda is more harmful.