Tag Archives: branding

Fifty Shades of ’Fifty Shades of…’

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Slide1The film adaptation of a certain best-selling erotic novel is shortly to hit the screens in the UK. Whatever you think of the subject matter, or the quality of the prose, it’s clear Fifty Shades of Grey has at least one thing going for it: a catchy and versatile title.

Much like the slogan ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’, ‘Fifty Shades of…’ lends itself to an endless number of adaptations, variations and parodies (or ‘creative linguistic variation’ as Artificial Intelligence research Tony Veale calls it), from ‘Fifty Shades of Dre’ to ‘Fifty Shades of Grape’.

And that’s surely no bad thing.

To illustrate just how creative writers, advertisers and bloggers have been with ‘Fifty Shades of…’, I used an online corpus search engine to crawl the web looking for examples. Here are the results: in no particular order, fifty of the seventy-five or so examples that I found – if you will, fifty shades of ‘Fifty Shades of…’.

The list includes the replacement of ‘Grey’ with other colours (‘Green’, ‘Pink’), with proper names (‘Miley’ as in Cyrus), with rhymes (‘Spay’, ‘They’), and even with food-stuffs (how about cookbook ‘Fifty Shades of Kale’?). Notable mentions go to ‘Fifty Shades of Bacon’ (apparently, and somewhat intriguingly, an ‘erotic cookbook’) and ‘Fifty Shades of Gravy’ (whatever that is). Of course, there will be many other examples out there, and plays on ‘Fifty Shades of Grey’ aren’t restricted to replacing the final word (for instance, who can resist the garden-based parody ‘Fifty Sheds of Grey’?). If you know of any better ones, do stick them down below.

So, without further ado, here they are.

Enjoy!

  1. Fifty Shades of Green
  2. Fifty Shades of Buscemi
  3. Fifty Shades of Dre
  4. Fifty Shades of Kale (a recipe book)
  5. Fifty shades of Brown (on race and politics)    
  6. Fifty Shades of Green (a whole foods market)
  7. Fifty Shades of Beige (about set design)
  8. Fifty Shades of Graying Workers (on the elderly labour market)
  9. Fifty Shades of Men (an advert for ‘male revue catering’)     
  10. Fifty Shades of Grape (wine sellers)
  11. Fifty Shades of Dubstep (compilation CD)
  12. Fifty Shades of Chocolate (a book)
  13. Fifty Shades of Matt Gray (sunglasses)
  14. Fifty Shades of Van
  15. Fifty Shades of Rust (a book)
  16. Fifty Shades of Cacao (health tips)
  17. Fifty Shades of Grace (a guide to Christian living)
  18. Fifty Shades Of Chocolate
  19. Fifty Shades of Miley (Miley Cyrus, who else?)
  20. Fifty Shades Of Lego
  21. Fifty Shades of Spay (apparently, February is ‘spay and neuter month’)
  22. Fifty Shades Of White With A Touch Of Red
  23. Fifty Shades of Deadly
  24. Fifty Shades of Putin
  25. Fifty Shades of Ink
  26. Fifty Shades of Glow
  27. Fifty Shades of Pain
  28. Fifty Shades of Rust
  29. Fifty Shades of Johnjay!
  30. Fifty Shades of Ray
  31. Fifty Shades of Me
  32. Fifty Shades of Silver
  33. Fifty Shades of Grain
  34. Fifty Shades of Beer
  35. Fifty Shades of F*cked Up
  36. Fifty Shades of Saffron
  37. Fifty Shades of Racism
  38. Fifty shades of Pink
  39. Fifty Shades of Gravy
  40. Fifty Shades of They
  41. Fifty Shades of Bacon (an ‘erotic cookbook’)
  42. Fifty Shades of Geek
  43. Fifty Shades of Gay
  44. Fifty Shades of EWWWW!!!
  45. Fifty Shades of Funny
  46. Fifty Shades of Gary
  47. Fifty Shades of Black
  48. Fifty Shades of Jigglypuff
  49. Fifty Shades of Finance (‘financial erotica’)
  50. Fifty Shades of Milk Tray

 

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Has your advertising slogan got ‘it’?

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ImageHave you noticed that, in the world of branding, there’s a lot of it about?

By which I mean, of course, the pronoun ‘it’ – the gender neutral, third person pronoun that can stand for just about anything.

Take, for example, Jaguar’s ‘Don’t dream it, drive it’ or L’Oréal’s ‘Because you’re worth it’. Or how about EA Sports’ ‘It’s in the game’. ‘It’ clearly gets around a lot.

But what’s it all about?

At its most basic, ‘it’ can be used as what linguistics call an anaphor, used to refer to something that’s already been introduced. For example:

Ronseal. It does exactly what it says on the tin.
VISA. It’s everywhere you want it to be.
American Express. Don’t leave home without it.
Red Bull. It gives you wings.

Other times, ‘it’ can be used to refer to that culturally-conventional concept of ‘desirability’, ‘sex appeal’ or ‘X-factor’ that people either have, or they don’t:

Maybe she’s born with it. Maybe it’s Maybelline.
Virgin Atlantic. You airline’s either got it or it hasn’t.

But in the cleverest cases, ‘it’ doesn’t have a clear reference. Instead, it can mean exactly what the customer wants it to mean.

Ebay. Buy it. Sell it. Love it.
Argos. Don’t just shop for it. Argos it.
Interflora. Say it with flowers.

In the first two cases, ‘it’ neatly stands for pretty much anything you can buy or sell. In the second, ‘it’ becomes any human sentiment.

Three brands stand out as the masters of using ‘it’ in this way.

In Burger King’s ‘Have it your way’, the restrictive sense of ‘have your burger with or without gherkins’ opens out into a more general statement of customer empowerment. In McDonalds’ ‘I’m loving it’, the notion of enjoying ones burger becomes a broader associative statement of happiness and positivity.

Then, of course, there’s Nike’s classic ‘Just do it’. Now more than 25 years old, and inspired by the last words of a death-row criminal, this one phrase most clearly demonstrates the powerful potential of ‘it’. Here, is ‘it’ that 10 mile run you’ve been putting off, or that 5-aside football final your office team is desperate to win. Or does ‘it’ extend to referents outside the sporting world? Is ‘it’ that tricky conversation with you’re boss you’ve been putting off, of that flat-pack shed still waiting to be assembled?

It doesn’t matter, of course. ‘Just do it’ is a slogan that inspires you to do whatever it is you need to do – though not before buying a pair of trainers first.

Finally, if you still don’t believe the powerful potential of ‘it’, try putting that two-letter word into this random slogan generator. Here’s just a few examples it threw back at me – all of them, I’m sure, would make the Mad Men proud:

You’ve always got time for it.
We’re serious about it.
Every kiss begins with it.But I’d rather have a bowl of it.

So next time you need to find that winning slogan for your brand, remember that simple, two-letter, flexible friend.

And just use it.