Crystal Light, some diet Kool Aid-style drink mix stuff, was
using the same tagline for a long time: “I believe in Crystal Light, ‘cause I
believe in me!” But wasn’t this tagline leaving out a lot of other types of
people, and therefore limiting the scope of its potential market? With that
tagline, they were only attracting selfish people. But there are lots of other
people they could be aiming for, you know; like paranormal researchers, alien
abductees, the tinfoil-hat crowd, etc. And to advertise to these markets,
they’d only have to change the last word in their already famous tagline, for
example: “I believe in Crystal Light, ‘cause I believe in ghosts”, “I believe
in Crystal Light, ‘cause I believe in Bigfoot”, “I believe in Crystal Light,
‘cause I believe in UFOs”, I believe in Crystal Light, ‘cause I believe in
government conspiracies to control my thoughts”, etc. Or might that
accidentally tend to lend less credibility to the veracity of their ad claims?
But it would at least mix it up a bit and keep things interesting. And maybe
the limited scope of this tagline’s target market is why they stopped using it.
(Although to be fair, there are a lot of selfish people out there. Unless they
mean to say that consumers of their products are extremely self-confident, in
which case, how come they feel they need to lose weight? I would think a
self-assured person would not succumb to such attempts at body image
manipulation marketing.)
But if they used this new ad campaign idea, they could have
ghost hunters say something like: “It’s low calorie and so delicious? It must be supernatural!”
Or they could have a conspiracy researcher say: “With such great taste and such
low calorie count, it must be a secret government conspiracy using alien
technology, and they’ve developed it to fight the obesity epidemic!” (And this
last point would only be significant, because everybody knows the obesity
epidemic is an alien-led government conspiracy to fatten us all up so the
aliens can eat us!)
Oh, and of course, they could tap an even larger demographic
if they ran an ad saying: “I believe in Crystal Light, ‘cause I believe in intelligent
design.” (Although they might risk losing their die-hard atheist scientists market.
Unless they made one with the flying spaghetti monster, or whatever. Or maybe
they could lure them back with an ad professing disbelief, or perhaps even professing
a belief in evolution {which they should have already done long ago to get that market!}.)
Here’s one of their old ads with the song that started the
tagline:
