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One day my friend Ash was being encouraging (as she often is), and
she sent me an email that just said:

 

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And I wrote back:




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I started to think that you could create a whole philosophy of self-

improvement around shoe company slogans:

 
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So I began collecting company slogans with an eye toward their self-help appeal. I
was surprised how many of them embraced great-minded sentiments. They're not afraid of
associating a grandiose statement with a marginal product or company. Besides being
memorable, slogans also try to create an emotional bond with the customer, and I guess this
means cultivating a need, an inspiration or a tone of importance. For example, it's not as if
Lowes Home Improvement thinks "Let's Build Something Together" is just about tile floors,
plastic siding, doorknobs or even customer service. Their slogan appeals to the rhetoric of
unity and cooperation, while also identifying their business (building) and using a sentence
construction that's memorable and familiar from other common phrases; in this case I think
of "The family that plays together, stays together," or “Do Something!” or “Let’s do
something,” or “Somebody do something!” It sounds rah-rah and active.
At lot of times I look around and wonder how we can allow ourselves to get run
ragged by consumerism. We employ so much personal energy in new purchases and
consumer choices. I think that besides always searching for means to discriminate ourselves
from others and add to our value, another reason consumer choices become personally
important is that brands and products, whether they deserve it or not, really do wrap
themselves up in images and language of more meaningful goals and desires. While vacuous
greed for status and value may lead in large part to someone’s product fluency, brands and
marketing also talk to us in concepts that we need to think about in order to create some kind
of identity for ourselves and structure for our experiences.
Corporate slogans are demonstrations of deep, earnest sentiments and needs
layered with a simple descriptions of objects, companies or services. Their broad meanings
and short length make them especially susceptible to be turned into pocket-ready advice. On
these next two pages are my takes on the raw marketing meeting of some slogans, as
well as my interpretations to guide anyone looking to derive personal reflection or guidance.

Tern of the Century 1