I have an irrational hatred of any product that describes variants of itself as “The [x] One”. Shreddies: The Frosted One. McDonalds Wraps: The Chilli Chicken One. Petrol: The Unleaded One.
I’ve been trying to pin down precisely why this annoys me, because it only reflects the way people talk about products with variants. When discussing what to buy from the supermarket, you don’t say “Let’s buy some McVities Digestive Biscuits, Caramel Flavour”, you say “I really like the caramel ones, let’s get some more of those”. When ordering at McDonalds, you don’t say “I would like a McWrap with Crispy Chicken and Sweet Chilli Sauce”, you say “I want the sweet chilli one”.
But I think that’s sort of part of the problem; I’ve always felt like there should be a disparity in the way people talk about a product and the way the product presents itself. It’s not customers’ jobs to do the marketing for the products, yet as soon as you make the name of the product the same as how people refer to it in casual conversation, you are intruding on that division. You are refusing to allow the customer to refer to the product the way they prefer to, instead taking the opportunity to throw in some “chummy copy”, as the folks on the excellent CheapShow podcast call it.
Chummy copy is the scourge of modern products. It’s why we get boxes of Coca-Cola telling you to “remember to flatten me before recycling me!” and boxes of cereal that say inane platitudes like “BREAKFAST is the MOST IMPORTANT MEAL of the DAY”, with every word in a different font. I don’t want a product to be my friend, I want it to perform the function I purchased it for. Which, in the case of most things that feature chummy copy, is to shut up and let me eat or drink it.
I’m not sure exactly where both of these things started. “The [x] One” can probably be at least indirectly attributed to the popularity of the sitcom Friends, whose episode titles were all The One With [An Individual Element of the Episode as a Whole] — and before you point out that Friends was a late ’90s/early ’00s phenomenon that couldn’t possibly be relevant 25+ years later, I would just point out that Krispy Kreme have just brought out a range of Friends-themed doughnuts, and “How You Doin’?” is still very much part of the popular vernacular — even if, I suspect, many people using it don’t know its origin.
For some reason it didn’t bother me in Friends, at least partly because Friends was the kind of show where the episode title didn’t matter. It was never displayed on screen at any point during the episode, for one thing, and it was an interesting novelty at the time, particularly compared to the dramatic episode titles shows like Star Trek were using in the same period.
Now, though? Chummy copy feels kind of weirdly insidious. Contrary to what I presume is its intention, which is to make products feel more approachable and trustworthy, I am disinclined to trust a product that makes such a big deal out of how amazing it is, or which tries to ingratiate itself with me by going “haha, look, we gave our product a SUPER CASUAL name like what you call it!”
Anyway, yeah. Time to open Microsoft Teams: The Work One and crack on with actually getting something useful done.
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