14. Banana Stickers
Posted in: Thirty-three things on Jul 22
If anything demonstrates the power of branding it's the banana sticker. Bananas are a commodity, yet somehow we believe that a banana labelled with a Carmen Miranda knock-off is a banana we want to buy.
In one apartment I'd collected over 50 different banana stickers on my refridgerator (including several different Chiquita stickers). Then I moved and had to spend an hour scrubbing the glue off the fridge door. In my new place I immediately resumed the practice of making tidy rows of banana stickers. I even started shopping at different stores to see where they got their bananas.
Even as I write this, I realize that obsessing over little oval stickers is, well, weird. But in my defense, my 50 stickers were a pittance compared to some people's collections. I also like to think that out of the thousands of marketing "impressions" I received every day, I was really analyzing at least one. The one on my banana.
Posted by Gene Smith on Jul 22, 2002
