U is for... Urban Street Talk

OK, I'm no expert on this, as you are about to see. It'd be banging if I were. But I ain't... like. But I can look on and wonder.

Sorry... toe-curlingly painful, I know, but I am trying.

Anyway, the reason for this uncomfortable ride into the unknown (another U) is that Coca Cola tried it recently with Diet Coke using short, silly phrases that only the under 15s would understand. Perfect anti-marketing. Confuse and disorientate. Why? Because Coke traditionally is aimed at the 20+ market while Pepsi is usually aimed at the teens and pre-teens. So Diet Coke decided to muscle in on their competitors with cans printed with ---- Get It, Okay Next, Can't Even, I'm Out, I'm In, Yaasss and It's Lit (as in the illustration above). They hoped that this would do the trick. And it probably did, too. I wasn't counting cans.

They also tried a series of television commercials which attacked their own age-stereotyping by using exactly the same campaign - which was deliciously confusing. Instead of just throwing these cans at the pre-teens as they had previously done, they did a complete U-turn and had two elderly women on a sofa browsing Tinder-like sites and using cool street-talk. "Not looking for long-term though, am I, babes?" says one old lady to the other.

Great anti-marketing is where you mix it all up and use complete opposites to get your message across, sometimes with the bonus that it might even attract a new market too.

This mixture of styles and opposites is the stock fodder of postmodernist marketing (or PoMo marketing to the really cool guys on the street) - chucking everything into the mix, seeing what happens and breaking all the rules along the way.

Look at this advertisement - it pretty-much combines everything that the twenties currently stand for, being a mish-mash of cultures, designs, products and styles. We have a fairly standard woman's bag, Nike sneakers/trainers, the hyper-world of Pikachu (in a very cool baseball hat) and the implication that the Black Lives Matter movement is in there as well. Great poster which hits the spot by being confused, complicated and full of different messages.

Classic urban PoMo marketing can also be seen on the many derelict and unused telephone boxes around the country. Instead of removing these artefacts of a pre-mobile past, they have been adopted by advertisers. It's a great way to get your message out there - they are living street billboards which the customer simply cannot ignore.

There are other 'U's. I asked a good (and very published) friend of mine, who is simply known as the Anti-Christ of Marketing, for inspiration on U. He gave me a great string of words beginning with what he considers the word of 2020 - ULULATION. Love it. Then there's UNIQUE and UBIQUITOUS - both used by marketeers with carefree abandon and in all the wrong grammatical places. His final U was the U in UNITED Kingdom, a word which has huge PoMo contradiction for the obviously reason that the kingdom has never been less united.

And if you want more on this stuff, then invest in the Bible of anti-marketing - a true reflection of how to do it all the wrong way and still win in today's marketplace. And if you contact me directly I can get you a copy with a slab of discount, which is more as a reward for getting to the end of this blog. Congrats.

Next up is the letter T.

https://www.lulu.com/en/gb/shop/adrian-liley/the-anti-marketeers-handbook-directors-cut/paperback/product-166jzkq8.html