Taglines Goof-up

A sight today prompted me to play with some taglines. It was an ad sign outside a small eatery. To be precise it was a handwritten ad made up of three different boards with a word on each. (Ohh how much better it would have been if I had my camera handy to show you rather than explaining it through words)

The words written on the signboards said -

Lunch

For

Open

…as I read them and I thought how incoherent of these people who say their first language is English. Then in a fraction of second I realised my over-sightedness – go back and read the words in reverse order and it all makes sense! I actually read the ad in reverse order and misconstrued it.

And how much relevant does it make the emphasis that is made in all work environments – ‘Give the product the customer perception’. The guy putting these signboards missed this perception and lost a potential customer (supposedly me) who did not get a word the eatery was trying to convey.

This thought set me to think about the readability issue I have had been working for in the past and frisk for some company taglines to goof up with. Here’s a list of them I played with:

• Apple would say box the outside think
• Bank of America would become an opportunist with a tagline ‘Opportunity of Bank’
• Barack Obama would get his mailbox full with optimistic replies to his question ‘Need we change’
• Chrysler would go crazy with no mercy on its bankruptcy with clients claiming the product in tagline ‘Standard comes Inspiration’
• This aint give any business to Expedia ‘right travel travel just don’t’
• Men gonna get bloody with Gillette bringing up such products ‘Sharp feel sharp look’
• Ford’s minor quality observation ‘one job is quality’
• Yup GE guys needs to work in this order ‘Work at Imagination’
• This gonna give Jaguar and Office Depot a new avenue of business ‘performance of art’ and ‘business of care taking’ respectively.
• Anyone could sue Gerber for this one ‘business our are babies’
• By the way to whom is Phillip Morris telling ‘Listen they’ll talk’
• And Lee is shouting it out ‘America built that Jeans’
• Of all Budweiser played safe that way ‘Beers of King’

And as obvious if you wanna read the original taglines read them in reverse…