Ways of skinning a cat

I recently finished Steven Pinker’s excellent ‘The Stuff of Thought’, which amongst other things made me think about taboos and advertising.

Eg:

I can think of three ways the ad industry has tried to sell bog roll (by ‘sell’ I mean build a brand, as opposed to accept that a category is commodity-driven). The most famous involves a cute puppy; a second uses a cute toddler; a third uses a bear. Puppies, toddlers and bears: all socially acceptable ways of broaching the… err…. defecation taboo.

Toilet paper maybe an extreme example but perhaps there are other categories where the number of brands is constrained by the number of ways of talking round a taboo…

Posted by: Sam at pre-lunch on Friday, 25th July 2008