Our Slogan Is Terrible

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Business slogans for make-believe corporations, especially in comedy shows, are often very, very bad.

They tend to come in a couple separate flavors, including:

  • Self-referential: "Alice's Groceries. We have a slogan!"
  • Unintended second meaning: "Bob's Engine Repair. We'll clean out your tailpipe!"
  • Too honest: "Chris's Deli. Now transmitting salmonella to only 5% of our guests!"
  • Uninspired: "Dan's Pizza Delivery. We deliver pizzas!"
  • Complete non sequitur: "Elaine's Dance Studio. Because everyone loves pineapples!"

A type of Stylistic Suck.

Examples of Our Slogan Is Terrible include:

Comic Books

  • Marvel's Roxxon Oil corporation, in the 1989 "Marvel: A Year in Review" (which was written as an in-universe magazine), had a big ad where in parody of the Exxon Valdez spill, their slogan was "There's plenty more where that came from."


Fan Works

  • Turnabout Storm has Phoenix blaming the slow business on the stupid slogan his assistant Maya came up with for his law office: "Wright & Co. Office: Defending you like it's nuttin' baby!". Later on this becomes the least of his problems.


Film

  • In Bill Murray's Scrooged, his television network has the cringe-inducing Christmas slogan "Yule love it!"
    • A bit of Truth in Television mixed with a touch of Take That; ABC's slogan during the 1985-1986 season (when Scrooged was being filmed) was "You'll Love it!". Lack of punniness aside, it wasn't much better.
  • Idiocracy: "Brawndo. It's got electrolytes!"
    • "Carl's Jr. Fuck you, I'm eating."
  • The "Ocean View Soap" slogans in The Muppets Take Manhattan - "Ocean View: Use It If You Don't Want To Stink"; "Ocean View: It's Just Like Taking An Ocean Cruise Except There's No Boat And You Don't Actually Go Anywhere" and the winner "Ocean View Will Get You Clean".
    • It gets funnier when one of the other frogs says, "You mean, just tell people what the product does? But we've never done that before." Probably counts as Fridge Brilliance as well.
  • The League of Gentlemen's Legz Akimbo theatre troupe display their slogan on their van: "Put yourself inside a child".
    • And let's not forget the town of Royston Vasey itself, whose slogan "You'll Never Leave" was allegedly previously considered for a real town...
  • The Dudley Moore vehicle Crazy People concerned Moore as an adman who went a bit crazy, telling people "the truth." Real products were used, such as: "Metamucil. It helps you go to the toilet. If you don't use it, you'll get cancer and die." "Jaguar -- the car for men who want handjobs from beautiful women." "Volvo -- they're boxy but they're good." and finally "Sony: Because Caucasians are just too damn tall."


Literature

  • Johnny and The Dead: "If it's a boot, it's a Blackbury!"
    • Later on, the company who wants to destroy the graveyard has the slogan "Forward to the future". Johnny says it makes the boot slogan sound good in comparison.
  • The Sheriff of Yrnameer has a Running Gag with the Firestick weapon marketing department and the tendency of their slogans to increase the size of the resulting holes in proportion to the model number of the firearm in question.


Live-Action TV

  • The Wesayso Corporation on Dinosaurs: "WESAYSO: We'll do what's right, if you leave us alone," "WESAYSO: We don't like to have our feelings hurt" and "WESAYSO: We know where you live."
  • A sketch on That Mitchell and Webb Look featured an advertising company which specialized in creating slogans that simply described what a company did in a slightly irritating way.
  • On Better Off Ted, a running gag was commercials for the company. They would always end with a slogan. Some were only funny in context, but others fit this trope, including:
    • "Teamwork- it keeps our employees gruntled"
    • "Virtual Dynamics- because you can't spell INDIVIDUAL without VIRIDIAN. And U.(pause) And an L."
    • "Food. Yum."
    • And, after the show was preempted for a Presidential Address- "When presidents talk, Americans get hurt."
  • Monty Python's Flying Circus "Conquistador Coffee" sketch. An ad writer comes up with campaign slogans such as "Conquistador Coffee brings a new meaning to the word vomit" and "The tingling fresh coffee which brings you exciting new cholera, mange, dropsy, the clap, hard pad and athlete's head. From the House of Conquistador". And, from an unrelated Parody Commercial: "Buy Whizzo Butter and go to Heaven!"
  • Saturday Night Live: "Nut-rific, it does nut taste good!"
    • Most (if not all) of Saturday Night Live's fake commercials (and sometimes, the station IDs to real cable networks they parody, i.e., "You're watching The Food Network. Porn for fat people," or "You're watching A&E, which means you're old or you fell asleep on the remote.") will have this.
  • My Name Is Earl - in the backstory Earl and Randy went to the Right Choice Ranch for troubled youth, which went through a series of Accidental Innuendo slogans that imply pedophilia: "Touching Bad Boys Since 1963" - "Bringing Boys To Their Knees Since 1963" - "Forcing Boys To Turn Around Since 1963" - "We Don't Do Anything Inappropriate to The Boys"
  • A faux commercial on the BBC comedy The Goodies has a spot for Bristo's gravy in which "Tie Me Kangaroo Down" songwriter Rolf Harris (Graeme Garden) comes home for dinner at his mum's (Tim Brooke-Taylor), takes a bite of his dinner with the gravy and keels over dead. The tagline: "Bristo's...gets rid of Rolf Harrises fast!"
  • In 30 Rock, the Sheinhardt Wig company has the slogan "Not Poisoning Rivers Since 1997."


Newspaper Comics


Theatre

  • In Of Thee I Sing, the various campaign slogans waved in "Wintergreen for President" range from basic ("Win With Wintergreen") to idiotic ("A Vote for Wintergreen Is a Vote for Wintergreen") to dubious ("Wintergreen--The Flavor Lasts") to cynical ("He Kept Us Out of Jail").


Video Games

  • The products advertised on GTA Radio have this come up a lot. For example, one of the taglines for Giggle Cream: "It's completely legal thanks to a loophole at the FDA!"
  • In the Zork universe, Frobozz Electric, the evil technology conglomerate which replaced Frobozz Magic in the wake of the Magic Inquisition, has numerous such slogans in their public address announcements in Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Among these:
    • "Frobozz Electric: We are the boss of you"
    • "Frobozz Electric: We bring bad things to life"
    • "Frobozz Electric: We bring good things to ourselves"
  • You will see those often in the first two Oddworld games.

Scrab cakes: it will cost you an arm and a leg!
Soulstorm Brew, new recipe: twice the bones, twice the taste, twice the price!

  • In Megatraveller, SMIRC (The Spinward Marches Interplanetary Raiding Corporation, aka organized space pirates) have the slogan "We have what it takes to take what you have!"
  • In Saints Row 2 a radio commercial for Ship It decides on this thanks to using a Slavic criminal named Vlad as a spokesman who attempts to "encourage" buyers with phrases like "If you love human trafficking as much as I do, you're going to need a boat" ("What do you mean human trafficking is illegal? How do these ugly men have wives?") "You will come buy boat at Ship It or I'll have your family killed"
    • "Ship It - bad at marketing, great at boats!"


Web Comics


Web Original

  • Homestar Runner loves to make these. Here are some examples:
    • "Homestarrunner.net. It's dot-com!"
    • "Cheat Commandos. Buy all our playsets and toys!"
    • "They're orange, doot doot. They're black, doot doot. Look for the one with me on the bag. Dressed as a vampire."
    • "Styles upon Styles. Steep Prices and Trees!"
    • "Blubbo's. You guessed it, we're called Blubbo's."
    • "Pistols for Pandas. This good cause is good! ...'cause!"
  • The Onion: In this article, an ad agency finds out the hard way that the slogans "Merit--Makin' You Feel All Small 'n' Flaccid" and "Merit--Love That Limply Dangling Taste" do not encourage 35- to 50-year-old males to buy cigarettes. In the wake of this marketing failure, the agency prepares to roll out its campaign to sell tampons with slogans like "Tampax--For Those Awkward Bleeding-From-Your-Crotch Days."


Western Animation

  • A number of cartoons and shows, including Looney Tunes, The Beverly Hillbillies and The Flintstones, had a joke about a fictitious film company called Miracle Pictures which had the motto "If it's a good picture, it's a Miracle!"
  • Every single organization in The Simpsons has such a slogan. From Springfield Prison - "If you were a murderer, you'd be home by now!" - to Costington's Department Store - "Over a Century Without a Slogan".
    • Monstromart: "Where shopping is a baffling ordeal"
  • On an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants, Plankton tries to come up with a slogan for the Chum Bucket. He originally uses 'Chum is Metabolic Fuel', but Patrick changes it to the even more nonsensical 'Chum is Fum', at which point the Chum Bucket business booms.
  • Futurama: "Slurm! It's highly addictive!"
    • Continuing the reversal above, the slogan for heroin and crack vending machines is simply "Refreshing!"
    • Gunderson's Unshelled Nuts. They're nut so good!
    • Fishy Joe's: "Come for the food then get the hell out."
    • Bachelor Chow: "Now with flavor."
  • In House of Mouse, one of the types of cartoons is "Mickey, Donald and Goofy run a business. Hilarity Ensues." Often, their business's name is something straightforward that just says what they do (though "what they do" is often absurdly specific or otherwise implausible), and the tag line Mickey answers the phone with is just a repetition of that. For example, "Organ Donors. We donate organs!" or "Roller Coaster Painters. We paint roller coasters!"
  • The Boondocks proposed a number of slogans for BET: "BET - it's what's on in the background," "BET - tell it to someone who gives a fuck," and "BET - 'cause you niggas got nothing better to watch."
  • Unintentional example: in The Backyardigans episode "Chichen-Itza Pizza", the slogan of the titular pizzeria is "We deliver".
  • In Family Guy, when Peter advertises for a car dealership, the slogan is "At Wilkins Hyundai and Subaru, we have Hyundais and Subarus!"


Other

  • French canadian Francois Perusse's radio skits Les Deux Minutes du Peuple frequently feature those. Notable example includes community radio CDKC (loosely translates from french to "broken CD") that uses a different one with every station ID and the man calling various businesses over the phone, each one answering with their slogan.
    • "CDKC, one antenna, one listener. And sometimes just one antenna."


Real Life

  • Buffalo, NY car dealer "Mike Barney Nissan" has the slogan "Awesome Cars, Great Dealership... Lousy Jingle".
  • Slogan of 105.9, the classic rock radio station in Chicago: "Of all the radio stations in Chicago... we're one of them."
  • "Love food? Think Arby's!" was this, right? I mean, it had to be this...
  • The webpage banner for the Pokémon fansite The PokéCommunity commonly displays a sentence (or a slight variation of it) above the forums, which states "We Are STILL Working On A Better Slogan." Cue several new users eagerly sending in submissions of possible new slogans to the higher-ups on the site staff.[1]
  • The launch ad campaign for the 2012 Toyota Yaris: "It's a car!"
  • An Atlanta-area furniture dealer, Sofa King, has billboards touting "Our prices are Sofa King low." Think about that a second.
  • Atlanta sports talk radio station WCNN (680 "The Fan") had a series of spots for morning host Christopher Rude's show "The Rude Awakening" which touted him as "the least interesting man in Atlanta radio" (apeing Dos Equus beer's Most Interesting Man In The World). Among the attributes: "He doesn't look for Waldo...Waldo looks for him," "When he takes his shirt off, kittens die" and "His vomit is used as soup in fine French restaurants."
  • Carlton & United Beverages ran an advertising campaign for Carlton Draught lager, with the slogan "Made From Beer".
    • The ad campaign parodied old-fashioned Australian beer advertising of the '70s and '80s, using cliche images such as draught horses working in golden fields and phrases such as "Pulled By Horses".
  • Also from the '70s in Australia, the prosaic slogan from a famous ad for a non-alcoholic beverage called Clayton's - "The drink you have when you're not having a drink". This became so popular (the ad and slogan, not the drink) that "Clayton's" became a standard colloquialism for "ersatz", "fake", or "inauthentic".
  • In 1992 fast food chain Rax used the slogan "You can eat here". The chain would file for bankruptcy months later.
  1. ↑ If one reads the site's FAQ section, one will learn that "We Are STILL Working On A Better Slogan" IS the website's slogan.
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