water bad post
November 12, 2006
on the side of my evian bottle, in tidy Haiku form, I’ve just noticed an example of the overlooked beauties of seemingly meaningless marketing:
“evian water is as unique
as its origin; 15 years of filtration
through the heart of the French alps.”
15 years of filtration through the heart of the French alps is a fairly unique process alright, so from a uniqueness perspective, it’s certainly one-of-a-kind, or one-kind-of-thing. Likewise, evian water is unique, since it too is one-kind-of-thing. In other words,
one kind of thing
is as unique
as another kind of thing.
We see the ad in question playfully teasing at our conventional understanding of uniquity. As readers, we are pulled along this train of thought, wondering wildly about the ubiquity of individuality and questioning the dogma of each person as a perfect snowflake, before it leads us to its inescapable conclusion: evian water is really good water. You should totally buy it.
Some say that modern marketing, especially in health food/drink areas, is full of ambiguous sweet nothings that turn in to tautologies and nonsense on closer inspection, but these people don’t appreciate the rollercoaster ride of connotations and philosophical implications that we must be taken on if the marketers are going to be able to convince us to buy something that’s literally available on tap in our own homes. Here’s another little gem from the label of my evian bottle that disproves the naysayers, exquisite in its simplicity:
”evian: Perfect bottled purity”
G’night.
