#1096 Branded Standards

It’s interesting to see how our culture has branded us to certain standards we’re often unaware of.
Like last week, I was at different events and each of them had generic soft drinks in cans. And with barely looking I could tell which flavor was which.
How? By the color of the can. The red can was cola, the brown can was root beer, and the green can was lemon-lime. Why? Because the most successful brands in each of those genres originally used those colors. Now that’s success; when your colors even identify the competition’s products.
Pepsi is working to re-brand itself as the blue-can cola. We’ll measure their true market penetration when the generic brands jump on the blue canned wagon. And they may. If frosty cold is what you want in a soft drink.
Nothing says cold like a blue can.
It’s interesting though. On the one hand, we eschew such exact regularity. Our language is littered with words like dollop and smidgen and load. And our words for our senses are sometimes vague too. We can have a taste of something. But can we have just a tiny smell of something? Maybe. You say, give me a taste of that coffee. So I suppose you could say, give me a whiff of that coffee.
People would just look at you oddly.
Speaking of coffee and unreliable measurements, you know when it says on your coffee maker that it makes 12 6-oz cups? Funny, huh? To everyone one else in the world, a cup is 8 ounces. Or in beer measurements, 2 cups make a pint and 2 pints make a quart.
After 2 quarts who cares.
Well, the reason Mr. Coffee first invented 6-oz cups is that’s how much coffee you make with one teaspoon. If they were smart and patriotic, they would have kept the 8 oz cups and invented a coffee spoon.
That prissy English “tea”spoon held us back from a full 8-oz cup of American coffee.
Sometimes I feel like my food is totally caught up in measurements. Not long ago I went to a potluck picnic and had a foot-long hot dog and 6, um, inch-iladas.
America, ya gotta love it.