The year the movie “Mary Poppins” came out, I was working toward my doctorate in psychology at Stanford University. This happened so long ago that the word “junkie” was commonly used to refer to somebody addicted to narcotics and probably selling narcotics. I tell you that so you can make sense of adhesive signs I started seeing around the Stanford campus reading “Mary Poppins is a junkie.” Maybe some mischievous Stanford students were taken with Mary’s squeaky clean image in the movie.
Well, then a juicy rumor began circulating that these signs were popping up all over the nation and Walt Disney himself was so outraged about it, he was hiring detectives to locate the miscreants for punishment. A phony rumor, I’d think, but in any case, I did start seeing a new set of signs around campus. Each one read, “Mary Poppins is NOT a junkie.”
Let’s move it to the present. A tag line for DiGiorno frozen pizza reads “It’s not delivery. It’s DiGiorno.” Just as the redone signs at Stanford make us think Mary Poppins might be a drug dealer after all, the DiGiorno tag line makes us associate the frozen pizza with the quality of pizza delivered to our home. In fact, one of their current ads reads, “If it looks like delivery, smells like delivery, and tastes like delivery, it’s DiGiorno.”
The tag line might be a good use of the word “not” in efforts to influence shoppers. However, consider it an exception. Using “not” is risky. Researchers at University of Colorado-Boulder, INSEAD, and Northwestern University find that people tend to forget the “not” and remember the rest. Consumers, especially seniors, who were in a hurry when told that a product had “no added sugar” often remembered the product later as having added sugar.
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