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A few years ago, the London tabloid Daily Mirror published the results of a study that found that 4 in 10 people don’t know how to use basic grammar. According to a 2019 survey from Grammarly, 64% of people send emails containing typos and grammatical errors. And after scouring the homepages of 799 technology companies, the proofreading service Editor Ninja calculated that spelling and grammatical errors were present on 97% and 94% of them, respectively.
These findings are probably good news for the marketing team at Papa Johns, which earlier this week took the wraps off a new slogan: “Better Get You Some.”
Wait—shouldn’t that properly read: “You’d Better Get Some”? Of course it should. Would the correct phrase sound as cool? No.
Which is the point, as the Papa Johns marketing brass explained to ADWEEK.
“There are times when you want to be grammatically correct, but the things that we find resonate with consumers are those very pithy, memorable phrases,” said Jaclyn Ruelle, vp and head of brand.
“A lot of this was creating a tone that’s about accessibility, about the way that we talk,” added CMO Mark Shambura. “The work is going to come to life across social and digital platforms—it’s by nature an accessible dialogue. It has to show up authentically.”
For the record, the new Papa Johns slogan is not replacing its tried and true “Better Ingredients. Better Pizza,” which has anchored the company’s advertising since 1995. Rather, the new banner is there to “breathe a little bit of new life into the brand and help us stretch down and reach a younger consumer,” Ruelle said. The original tagline is a differentiating statement, while the new one is a rallying cry.
“We’re bringing ‘Better Ingredients. Better Pizza” to life,” Shambura explained. “It’s bigger, it’s bolder, and there’s energy around it.”
If Papa Johns is “stretching down” by using slang, it has plenty of company. Brands have a long tradition of bending syntactical rules for the sake of standing out and convincing consumers that they’re, you know, down with it.
Consider Apple’s “Think Different” or the California Milk Board’s ubiquitous “Got Milk?” Odds are that the correct versions of these refrains—“Think Differently” and “Do you have any milk?”—just wouldn’t cut it.
At least not with younger consumers. Earlier this year, when PepsiCo introduced lemon-lime beverage Starry, it debuted the slogan, “Hits Different”—which, though it puts an adjective where an adverb should be, is a ubiquitous refrain on Instagram and TikTok, where the youth of America spend a lot of their time. (Coincidentally or not, “Hits Different” is also a Taylor Swift tune.)
Speaking at ADWEEK’s Commerceweek summit in February, PepsiCo svp of beverages for North America Stacy Taffet explained that the beverage and its slogan were “very much rooted in Gen Z culture.”
In other words, if you want young consumers, it can’t hurt to sound like them.
Papa Johns didn’t roll out “Better Get You Some” on its own. Franchisees recently voted to up their contributions to the chain’s National Marketing Fund to “improve audience selection” and “create cultural buzz,” according to a statement. Following an agency review, headquarters signed The Martin Agency in December to help it “cut through the ‘sea of sameness’” in the category.
The new tagline appears as part of a minute-long ad that features lots of quick-cut video about melted cheese and a backing track by rapper Big Boi.
For veteran marketing consultant Gary Stibel, managing partner of the New England Consulting Group, the tactic is logical—at least to a point. “They’re after a younger demographic,” he said. “Big Boi is popular among the younger demographic. The music is enjoyable. It’s fun to watch.”
What gives Stibel pause is the grafting of this new slogan onto the old one.
“It doesn’t make sense because simplicity is one of the key ingredients to effective communication, and the more complicated it gets, the more difficult it is for the viewer,” he said.
Charles Byers, who teaches marketing at Santa Clara University’s Leavey School of Business, had a similar appraisal. While a grammatical foible doesn’t “necessarily make any tagline bad,” a tagline as an appendage is a different story.
“They’re creating clutter rather than clarity,” he said. “A strong, creative tagline—and ‘Better Ingredients. Better Pizza’ is a great tagline—can, and should, stand alone.”
