Made to make your mouth water?

As you may or may not know, one of my many alter egos is The InnQuizitor. If you knew that, one point. Which is meaningless as this isn't a quiz.

Anyway, I like to think my pub quizzes are entertaining, rewarding and possibly even informative. I even try to be 'fair', which can mean a lot of different things to different people but, specifically, I deliberately seek out questions to which I personally wouldn't instinctively know the answer, and avoid leaning too heavily into 'my era'. 

The participants are a fairly healthy spread of ages from those in their late teens or early 20s right up to octogenarians, whose exact ages I wouldn't like to ask, so it's not as though I'm setting questions for a bunch of my fellow 49 year olds.

 

They've rebadged it, you fool 

Last night I set a 1990s round. One of the questions was 'Opal Fruits were renamed in 1998. What was the new name?' 

Only half the teams got the answer correct, which is telling, but it wasn't because people have forgotten the old name, but because the new one, reassuringly, never caught on. Even 28 years after the renaming, a lot of people still internally think of the product as Opal Fruits. They purchase a pack of Opal Fruits. Their favourite Opal Fruit flavour is Lime. Or Orange, or whatever, that's not the point, is it? You can absolutely fucking hate the things and still know that they are Opal Fruits, as part of your involuntary mental process.

The stupid new name never registered with a lot of people. It just didn't click. When they're eating their Opal Fruits, they know full well that it technically has a 'new' name now, but it never made its way into their internal dialogue. They'll always be Opal Fruits. Even when everyone born before 1998 is dead, the name recognition of the product will likely never reach the levels that Opal Fruits achieved at their peak. The 'deadname' will triumph. As it should.

And that's a lesson from which marketing pricks can learn. Stop trying to change stuff, because we'll still use the 'correct' names. Indeed, people like me will deliberately do so as an act of defiance.

Marathon Bars. Oil of Ulay. The Midland Bank. Jif. Prince Charles. (And Prince Andrew, for that matter. Who the fuck is actually calling him 'Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor' in real life?)

You can't force your new-fangled fuckfaced shit upon us. We stand defiant. 

(Oh, and the answer to the question is 'Starburst' of course. But nobody in their right mind ever says that....)