The other day, I was at an American-style diner in the middle of Saigon, eating a perfectly average (I say that with the utmost affection) cheeseburger, fries, and, for the sake of nostalgia, a glass of root beer. They really nailed the decor at this place, too; above my right shoulder was a vintage sign for the root beer in question, Barq’s, whose slogan came back to me in a rush: “It’s good.”
This is a piece of ad copy that I find particularly compelling. Bold in its proclamation, it’s at once incredibly simple and, for root beer fans, pretty much an irrefutable truth that can, nevertheless, be interpreted in any number of ways (yeah, it’s good enough; oh, this is the good stuff). This slogan served them well and has been with the brand since its inception all the way back in 1898. It should be noted, still, that they tried to freshen things up in the late ‘90s with ‘Barq’s has bite!’ As outlined in a case study from a graduate student in Syracuse’s Newhouse School of Public Communications, however, the public reception to deviation from ‘It’s good’ was luke-warm. Stick with what works, I suppose.
What this glass of root beer also did was get me thinking about the value of vagueness in slogans. Let me give another example. When I was in high school, to do pretty much anything of consequence you had to drive to a place known as ‘downstate.’ This simply referred to the more-populous Southern Michigan; playing tennis matches, attending youth government conferences, finding Jimmy John’s sandwiches, you name it, we drove there to do it. On the way back home, the de-facto signifier of having returned to the far north came in the form of an unmistakable billboard for a tourist attraction in nearby St. Ignace, Michigan called ‘The Mystery Spot.’ The sign, jutting out of from a dense, highway-side expanse of Eastern Hemlocks, proudly proclaimed that the mystery spot was, in fact, ‘voted number one.’
This was, to friends and I, a failproof source of comic relief on the monotonous journey. Who had deemed this place number one? What discipline was it topping the list in? These questions were simply never answered and, to my knowledge, neither I nor any of my buddies ever bothered to visit the Mystery Spot. Our judgments were, I’ve come to learn, unfounded: the Mystery Spot is both mysterious and did claim the crown in a certain list.
Let’s get to the history. The Mystery Spot came to be when, on their way to chart the vast Michigan upper peninsular, a group of surveyors discovered none of their equipment worked in a particular spot in St. Ignace. Sensing a business opportunity, they created a liminal space where gravity doesn’t act quite right and where, to this day, you can play a round of mini golf or scale a high ropes course. Reports from Atlas Obscura, though unsubstantiated, note that some visitors feel “queasy and light-headed” after spending too much time within the Mystery Spot’s bounds. As it happens, there’s another mystery spot that purports to be, “a gravitational anomaly located in the redwood forests just outside of Santa Cruz, California.”
Sorry for burying the lede here, but, anyway, Northern Michigan’s variation was voted number one after all. The Mystery Spot took the top place in Michigan Living Magazine’s list of of unusual attractions state-wide. No lies in sight.
Like Barq’s, I think the lesson here is a simple one; if you’ve got something good, let it speak for itself and let the rest be, for lack of a better word, a mystery.