Snacklish
« previous post | next post »
Reported last week in the NYT: an advertising campaign by the Mars company for its best-selling candy bar, Snickers, centered on a made-up "language" called Snacklish. Yes, it's not an actual language, but just some playful vocabulary.
(Hat tip to Doug Kenter.)
This is not the Snickers people's first brush with playful vocabulary; back in 2006, I reported here on an earlier advertising campaign using playful morphology, in particular:
hungerectomy
peanutopolis
nougatocity
substantialiscious
satisfectellent
On to the current campaign. According to the NYT:
The Snickers campaign, by the New York office of TBWA/Chiat/Day, is being rolled out in stages. The initial phase, which gets under way this week, includes outdoor ads and content on the Snickers Web site (snickers.com) as well as Facebook.
Television commercials are scheduled to begin appearing next week. And there will be more content on snickers.com in the spring, including a way to translate regular language into the Snickers lingo.
Snacklish is a humorous way of speaking that revises everyday words and phrases for a Snickers-centric world. To underscore their origin, they are printed in the typeface and colors of the Snickers brand logo.
For instance, the basketball great Patrick Ewing becomes Patrick Chewing. Combine the rapper Master P with the peanut, a main ingredient of Snickers, and he turns into Master P-nut — perhaps a hip-hop relation of the Planters brand mascot, Mr. Peanut.
Other examples include a Snickers taxi, or snaxi; peanutarium, for planetarium; and chompensation, for compensation. And the Sigma Nu fraternity is transformed into Sigma Nougat, after another Snickers ingredient.
(The article has a photo of a Snaxi.)
On the Snickers site: chewconomy, chompetition, MVP-nut, nougativity, nougetaboutit, nutopia, nutlegience [as in "pledge nutlegience"], nutvana, satisfocalypse [as in "the Four Horsemen of the Satisfocalypse"], snaxophone. Plus a link to the Snickers Facebook site.
Snacklish plays on ordinary vocabulary by introducing parts (or all) of Snickers-related words into it: chew, chomp, nougat, nut, peanut, satisfy/satisfaction/satisfactory, snack. Not a hard game to play, but some of the combinations are stretches, and need some context to be interpretable.