Brown, I’d prefer you didn’t

I just remembered something that made me laugh a while back. I was talking to a friend of a friend who works for UPS. We were joking about the tagline “What can brown do for you?” when he told me about an internal effort to galvanize support for the new campaign. The execs were trying to think of something catchy when someone suggested “Operation Brownstorm.” This stuck. As a storm of brown might.

The teams, I was told, couldn’t believe that management would go with such a blatantly scatological reference. Not only that but employees were encouraged to “Get behind Operation Brownstorm!” Um, no thank you. I’ll stay right out here in front. A safe distance from the squall.

Lesson: when Googling for name inspiration be sure to deselect the mature content filter.

UPDATE: If you want to mount an awareness effort on the color brown, you might have a look at the Chicago Transit Authority’s Countdown to a New Brown. There’s built-in potty humor there too, of course, but no storming as far as I can tell.