My first time back in Scotland in five years and I find the country in something like denial. Where I expected to find people of feisty spirit, brimming with self-confidence as they looked forward to independence, I found instead a society in denial over butter.
Shop shelves were stacked, tables cluttered, with various kinds of margarine supposed to clog less than the full monty dairy gear. The manufacturers' goal is, while asserting the advantages of their product over butter, to find a way of getting the word butter into the product name. In the effort to do this they have stumbled on to a completely new concept in brand naming: prolixity.
Remember when the ideal brand name
was considered to be something snappy - Coke, Twix, Brut, Stork - distinctive, easily committed to memory and rapidly barked across the counter of the shop? Thirty years of supermarket retail hegemony and some genius has realised that people don't want to bark at the products on the shelves, they want to relate to them, empathise with them, bond. Out with loud, impenetrable names like Daz and Crest, in with . . . I Can't Believe It's Not Butter.
It's goodbye to the sound byte and welcome to the sound four-course meal (coffee included). Here is the kind of branding the public craves and needs. Our splintered and atomised society - its ears bunged with Walkman dross, eyes dazed by Sky -
is in desperate need of something all previous generations have taken for granted: a mindless chat. This may now become available, like everything else, in supermarkets. The ultimate justification for shopaholics; the product as therapy.
I Can't Believe It's Not Butter quite spontaneously provokes a reply - ''no, it's much less insipid than most margarines'' or ''all those vindaloos must have seared your tastebuds, this
stuff tastes like Swarfega''. A snappy brandname like, say, Caramac, was never really suitable as a conversational gambit. The way now seems open for prolix brand names and you can confidently expect to become intimate with products like: I'd Rather Buy A Pack Of Six Ballpens And Lose Five Of Them Than Buy Them One At A Time, or I Won't Get A Hangover With This Low Alcohol Burgundy, But Then I Won't Enjoy It Much Either.
Nor will it be long before the marketing geniuses move away from smug first-person statements into the more confrontational second person or the inflammatory third person.
You Haven't Cleaned The Toilet For A Week! the latest Harpic substitute will accuse the embarrassed shopper. Male toiletries have a deodorant called You Won't Be Needing The Condom Unless You Spray With Me First (free condom promotional offer).
Once into the third person it's no holds barred, low down and dirty. She Says Your Feet Are Mingin' insoles; He Couldnae Hammer In A Nail Tae Save His Life instant glue; He Won't Be Able To Keep His Hands Off This designer dress. Or
a drop of 12-year-old malt called The World Believes I Come From A Region Of England And Will Continue To Do
So Until You Establish Clear Credentials Of Nationhood.
In the near future, that inexpressible void in everyone's life, the void once filled by neighbourly gossip, will be satisfyingly filled by a cacophony of allegations, assertions and accusations emanating from the labels on the packets of products which fill our cupboards. Open the door and dozens of quarrelsome products will be jostling with each other to thrust their opinion at you. Cupboard love will take on a whole new meaning. Neighbourliness will fade into the past and we will refer to cupboardliness. An Australian television company will storm the world's airwaves with a soap called Cupboards.
No longer will the elderly feel neglected and isolated; they can enjoy endless chats with the contents of their cupboards and fridges. Adolescence will cease to be a time of alienation and estrangement as the voices from the shelves of bathroom and bedroom respond to and challenge introspection. Another slice of our low-fat, low-cholesterol, low-grade collective soul is about to be separated out, packaged and marketed.
Defiantly spreading my toast with butter, I contemplate this fascinating prospect and I Can't Believe It's Not Better.
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