Share ideas that inspire. FALLON PLANNERS (and co-conspirators) are freely invited to post trends, commentary, obscure ephemera and insightful rants regarding the experience of branding.

Saturday, April 08, 2006

Anatomy of a Gatorade Bottle

Is the Gatorade bottle phallic?



Seth and I have recently run some semiotics of water and sports drinks, yet this one completely escaped our consideration.



I caught this ongoing debate and respons over at Darren Rovell's Gatorade Blog(author of First In Thirst) who responds with the official explainer about the classic bottle design: "Gatorade's bottles are built the way they are because of the fact that the plastic has to hold up under extremely high heat without being permanently warped. The E.D.G.E. ergonomic bottle is made so that it can be optimally gripped."

Aight. I could buy that logic.



He also offers the perspective that since the majority of Gatorade's bottles are purchased by men and boys, it seems counter-intuitive to intentionally shape your product like a piece of male anatomy. Right?



But the argument and imagery provided by the blog Basketbawfulis not only humourous, makes you kinda go 'hmnn'...suddenly EVERYTHING looks like Gatorade porn after you filter the world thru this suggestion.

This is like when I was a kid and read Bryan Scott Key's Subliminal Seduction in the school library. Suddenly we were all seeing sex in the ice cubes and bottles of Sprite and J&B ads!

Decide for yourself: conspiracy, or dirty minds (Basketbawful's orginal captions and additional photos are quite amusing, though).

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

funny. i've always been worried that my tackle looked a lot like a bottle of gatorade...

Tim said...

Hmm I wonder what Freud would say to your analysis.

Adrian said...

So let me see, you and Seth were discussing this?

AKI SYSTEMS 2600 said...

don't mock the power of the subliminal suggestion!

skulls in the ice cubes! naked ladies in the frosty bottles! Coke bottles shaped like ladies! Cokeeven sees the need to print a picture of its "lady-shape" bottle on a can. how ridiculous is that?

cuz it's subliminal.

but now i am seeing things in the Propel bottle, too: http://whyfiles.org/177bottle_water/images/propel.jpg

the conspiracy is all around us!