Is Nike’s Just do it the worst tagline ever? Or the best?

Just do it. By Serena Williams.

Say you were Nike’s Chief Marketing Officer. 

Say you were searching for a tagline that would define your brand. 

Just do it. By Alex Morgan.

Would you choose a line associated with good karma, with success, with victory? Or would you choose a line spoken by a notorious serial killer facing the death penalty? 

You’d choose a line associated with success, right? Or maybe not. 

Nike’s famous Just do it slogan is derived from the last words of the serial killer Gary Gilmore.

The story is that the unrepentant serial killer was facing a firing squad and was asked if he had any last words. He said, “Let’s do it”. 

Dan Weiden, the head of the ad agency handling the Nike account, took Gilmore’s words and changed “Let’s do it” to "Just do it". The rest is history. Just do it remains one of the most powerful and successful marketing campaigns ever. 

To be fair, "Just do it" is not really comparable to my previous post about VW Phaeton. “Let’s do it” and “Just do it” could be general purpose English words in a way that Phaeton clearly is not. But the interesting point, the counter-point to the VW Phaeton story, is that good ideas need not originate from sources with good karma.

Let's do it. By Gary Gilmore.
On his way to being executed.

Was VW Phaeton the worst brand name ever?

A VW Pheaton rolling out of its "Transparent Factory"

Say you were a big company’s Chief Marketing Officer. 

Say you were searching for a brand name for your new super-premium flagship product. 

Would you choose a name associated with good karma, with success, with victory? Or would you name your product after one of history’s most notorious losers? 

You’d choose a name associated with success, right? Or maybe not. 

Back in 2002, Volkswagen chose to name their flagship luxury car the Phaeton. 

The Phaeton was the most premium car in VW’s history, a luxury sedan positioned alongside the Mercedes S class range, priced at over USD 100,000 in today's money. 

The German engineering worked. By most contemporary accounts the car was superb, with a Lamborghini class engine, with refined road-handling, fully loaded with features like passenger-specific climate control. It was made in VW’s famous Transparent Factory in Dresden, where customers could visit the shop-floor and watch their cars being assembled.

Yet, despite the superb product, the Phaeton was a commercial disaster. Production had to be stopped in 2014. 

VW Phaeton’s story follows the same narrative arc as that of the mythological Phaeton, the demi-god the car was named after.

The original Phaeton was born to Apollo and a water-nymph Clymene. 

In those days, the sun rode around the heavens in Apollo’s chariot, drawn by four white horses, guided by the charioteer Helios. 

Phaeton had not trained as a charioteer. But the teenager ignored his own unreadiness, took advantage of an unwise divine promise and took control of his father’s sun-chariot. Unable to control the sun-chariot’s incredible power he steered it too close to the earth (therefore scorching the Sahara), he then overcompensated and steered too far away from the earth (therefore freezing the tundra). At this point he panicked and was plunging the sun towards Greece itself. Zeus had no choice but to throw a thunderbolt at his grandson to strike Phaeton dead. Zeus had his duties. He had to save the planet.

So, why did Volkswagen’s Phaeton fail? 

Like all big events this failure doesn’t have a single cause. But let’s not rule out the possibility that Volkswagen invited Zeus’ wrath by invoking Phaeton’s name. 

Maybe the Chief Marketing Officer would have been better off choosing a classical sounding name that Zeus didn’t have strong feelings about, like Lexus or Acura.

Phaeton the unready charioteer plunging toward the earth

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P.S. This blogpost was triggered by reading the chapter about Phaeton in Mythos, Stephen Fry's excellent retelling of the Greek epics.

Atal Behari Vajpayee, please meet Cliff Richard: a fellow bachelor boy from Lucknow

Vajpayee mural in Lucknow

Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee was unquestionably one of Lucknow’s greatest citizens. 

Vajpayee was a freedom fighter, poet, orator, and diplomat. The late Prime Minister represented Lucknow with distinction in the Lok Sabha for three decades. He was a statesman who could work for peace with Pakistan even while decisively defeating them on the Kargil battlefield. His term as India’s Prime Minister is still remembered as a time of unprecedented progress and prosperity. 

Lucknow is justly proud of Bharat Ratna Atal Behari. 

The City of Lucknow honoured him with a giant mural.

The City of Lucknow also honoured Sir Cliff Richard with a similar mural.

Cliff Richard mural in Lucknow

While Sir Cliff is not generally associated with Lucknavi tehzeeb, he was born at King George’s hospital in Lucknow. His Anglo-Indian parents worked for the colonial Indian Railways. They were based in Dehra Dun at the time. They came down to Lucknow for looking for better maternity care. Cliff Richard's family later moved to Calcutta and emigrated to the UK in 1948, when Cliff was eight years old. 

So, what do Cliff Richard and Atal Behari Vajpayee have in common? If their murals were to come to life, would they find anything to talk about?

Maybe they could talk about being bachelor boys. 

One of Sir Cliff's greatest hits is "Bachelor Boy". The song goes: 

“Son, you are a bachelor Boy

And that’s the way to stay

Son, you’ll be a bachelor boy

Until your dying day.”

Sir Cliff, being a man of integrity, lived by his own advice. He dated many charming ladies, including Sue Barker a tennis player and former French Open singles champion. But he has remained a bachelor (at least until his eightieth birthday).

Atalji was a bachelor too. 

The way Vajpayee put it "main kunwar hoon par brahmachari nahin" (I'm single but not celibate). 

Sir Cliff might relate. They might just have something to talk about. 

Though I doubt if even Sir Cliff’s persuasion could get Atalji to do the dance steps from the Bachelor Boy video (click here to watch). Those immortal moves can belong to one and only one of the Lakhnavi bachelor boys.

Summer Holiday - the album featuring Bachelor Boy

Did Don McLean anticipate the 2020 Biden-Trump election?

I was reflecting on the weirdness of Donald Trump refusing to concede to Joe Biden and the words that came to mind, unbidden, were:

“The players tried to take the field 

the marching band refused to yield…”

From Don McLean’s American Pie.

Could Don McLean have foreseen this moment fifty years ago? 

Sort of like Nostradamus foresaw moments in the future? I’m only half kidding. 

American Pie is so different from, and so much better than, the rest of Don McLean’s work that it is easy to imagine that the song was written by a higher force that just expressed itself through Don McLean when he was in an altered mind-state, sort of like the state Samuel Taylor Coleridge was in when he wrote Kubla Khan.