Monday’s mail brought a little brochure from Smart, the micro-car brand that’s manufactured by Daimler AG and distributed in the U.S. by Mercedes-Benz.
The brochure is a real un-fest. Here’s the cover:
Unthink. Uncrowd. Uncomplicated. Unlandfill. Uncar.
Inside, another headline declares the Smart to be “Unpricey.”
There’s even more Un on the Smart website:
Untame. Uncar. (Can anyone tell me what “tridion” is?) (UPDATE: See the first comment.)
The Pure coupe is the “unboring” “uncar.”
The Passion coupe (yep, a car called Passion!) invites you to “unleash” … something.
There’s also a Passion cabriolet, which can be unroofed.
These 2013 models seem to have replaced the original Smart Fortwo, which I have chosen to pronounce “Fort Wo.”
We haven’t seen this much unning since April 2009, when KFC introduced its “UNthink” slogan to accompany the UNfried menu. Later that year, Ben Zimmer devoted an “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine to what he called “The Age of Undoing”: he discussed social-media coinages such as “unfriend” and “unfollow” and the business world’s “unconference” and “unmarketing.” (Ben followed up with a more scholarly analysis in the Visual Thesaurus.)
The granddaddy of Un-branding—the ur-Un, you might say—was J. Walter Thompson’s positioning of 7Up as “The Uncola” in a campaign that lasted from 1968 to 1974.
The first 7Up Uncola ad from 1968. 7Up was “un in a million”; the company even produced glassware in an inverted Coke-glass shape. See more Uncola ads in a 2004 student paper about 7Up posted on the Duke University website. (Link broken.)
Compared with those old 7Up ads, Smart’s TV campaign from last fall is underwhelming.
But I’ll give it this much credit: it’s an improvement over tiny-car rival Fiat 500’s original slogan: “You Are. We Car.”
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Credit for the title of this post goes, of course, to Ralph Wiggum.
"Tridion" describes the safety shell wrapped around the passenger compartment; it's made of three layers of steel, which probably explains the "tri-" part.
Posted by: CGHill | June 06, 2012 at 07:27 AM
@CGHill: Thanks! All I could find was SDL Tridion World, a community website for people interested in content management. Obviously not automotive.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | June 06, 2012 at 07:32 AM
I'm surprised they went with "fortwo" when they could have spelled it "4.2" (or 4/2, 4*2, etc.).
Posted by: Jan Freeman | June 06, 2012 at 07:40 AM
@Jan: There was also a five-door hatchback, manufactured from 2004 to 2006, called the Forfour.
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | June 06, 2012 at 07:44 AM
Ford, in the 1930s and 1940s, offered Tudor and Fordor sedans, more than enough reason for me to refrain from mocking Smart for its model names.
Posted by: CGHill | June 06, 2012 at 07:43 PM
@CGHill: And what did Ford call their station wagon -- Mordor?
Posted by: Nancy Friedman | June 07, 2012 at 06:23 AM
A Tridion cell transforms the unsafe car into the safe uncar.
Posted by: steve | June 07, 2012 at 04:13 PM
I can deal with "fortwo". I'm stuck on "sharpred".
Posted by: steve | June 07, 2012 at 04:20 PM