Have a happy holiday with Marshalls law

We’re all used to advertisers looking for cutesy catch phrases with which to embed their brand names into people’s heads—didn’t the late ad man Jim Jordan, of “Wisk beats ring around the collar” fame, refer to it as nameonics? Whatever the case, the other night, in an end-of-day haze, I saw a commercial for the discount retailer Marshalls that dispensed snippets of holiday shopping wisdom under the banner “Marshalls Law.” I’ve no idea whether this campaign has been around for a while or what, but … Marshalls Law? As in “martial law”? You can just hear the execs at Marshalls saying, “It’s kind of catchy!” Yeah, catchy, as long as you don’t take five seconds or so to think it through.