The museum of dead slogans

They used to matter. Those six words on a wall could change everything. They could make you quit your job, start running, fall in love with a phone, or feel beautiful for the first time in your life. They were short, arrogant, and utterly human. They didn’t sell you things; they sold you 'yourself'.

“Just Do It.” “Think Different.” “Because You’re Worth It.” Each one a sermon condensed into syntax. Each one proof that capitalism could, for a second, sound like salvation.

Now they’re ghosts. Filed away in forgotten Google Drives, tagged 'final_v7_APPROVED', collecting digital dust next to abandoned rebrands. They survive as quotes in conference slides, as ironic T-shirt prints, and as echoes of a language that once believed in its own audacity. We killed them gently, bureaucratically, with bullet points and dashboards.

The autopsy was quiet. No scandal, no outrage. Just updates. We replaced slogans with mission statements, poetry with positioning decks, and copywriters with “content designers”. Now every brand has a voice so polished it squeaks. Every word sounds like it was written by someone apologising for writing.

I remember the first time it felt wrong. A pitch meeting. Someone said, “We don’t do taglines anymore; we create experiences.” Everyone nodded, relieved. Because experiences don’t get judged for grammar. They don’t get quoted. They don’t have to live forever.

Slogans were dangerous. They declared a position in public, and that’s no longer acceptable. They could be mocked, misunderstood, memed. They could divide. They could fail. And failure, in our time, is a bigger sin than emptiness.

Now we don’t write manifestos. We optimise tone. We don’t inspire. We calibrate. Slack threads have replaced creative arguments; Notion boards have replaced drafts; AI summaries have replaced doubt. The age of belief was replaced by the age of polite efficiency.

Walk with me.

First room: Just Do It. Still alive, barely, pulsing in a Nike subfolder titled heritage assets. The original file was corrupted, restored, and colour-corrected for Gen Z. Now it’s a hashtag used by gyms and burnout coaches.

Next: Think Different. Apple’s relic. A rebellion trademarked, mass-produced, and finally upgraded out of existence. It still smells faintly of risk. Of Steve Jobs in a black turtleneck pretending technology was poetry.

Then Open Happiness. Coca-Cola’s attempt to sell redemption in liquid form. They meant well; they always do. Now it’s looped in an internal Canva template for “brand legacy presentations”.

Further down, I’m Lovin’ It. A jingle that refuses to die, playing forever on autoplay in the metaverse food court. Empty optimism, perfectly preserved in 4K.

The visitors move in silence. They take photos through museum glass, smile for the algorithm, and post: “So inspiring.” No one reads the captions. No one wonders where the words came from. They’ve forgotten that someone once fought for them in a room full of cigarette smoke and fear.

That’s how faith ends. Not with rebellion, but with compliance.

We didn’t kill slogans because they stopped working. We killed them because they worked too well — because they could still make us feel something unmeasurable, unmonetisable, unmanageable.

And the system can’t tolerate that. Belief doesn’t scale. Faith doesn’t A/B test. Conviction doesn’t perform well against benchmarks. So we replaced them with what we could control: tone of voice guides, content pillars, and AI copy drafts that all sound vaguely human but never 'alive'.

Try reading a modern brand book. It’s a mausoleum of moderation. Every word was filtered through Legal, HR, and the algorithm. Every sentence is terrified of leaving a mark. Language scrubbed of personality, of risk, of friction. The perfect tone for a culture that confuses neutrality with intelligence.

The last room is empty. It’s reserved for the next masterpiece of nothing, a slogan already briefed, optimised, pre-approved by 27 people, run through ChatGPT, translated, localised, and drained. By the time it’s published, it will already be dead.

Maybe one day, someone will dare again. To write a line without a safety net. To believe that language can still wound, still seduce, still move people in a way no algorithm can predict. Maybe someone will risk ridicule for the sake of honesty. 

Not to trend. Not to please. To say something.

Until then, the museum stays open. Admission is free. Wi-Fi included. It runs on recycled light and nostalgia. Its corridors smell faintly of ambition and disinfectant. And every so often, when the servers lag and the motion sensors flicker, you can almost hear them whispering, the ghosts of slogans that once believed in us more than we believed in them.

(Ercole Egizi is a Global Brand Transformation Leader with over 15 years of experience helping international brands and agencies navigate growth, repositioning, and digital reinvention. Connect with him on LinkedIn)