Or rather it’s like trying to create a chocolate festival. Ordinarily that would be quite easy; it’s just a matter of adding chocolate. But unless you have a monopoly on chocolate, patent the use of chocolate as a festival centrepiece and copyright the word “chocolate” itself, pretty much anybody, anywhere else can top you. Take any backwater town and follow this recipe:
- Sift to remove stray dogs
- Skim off that “smell” permeating from the bar and “Jim”, the local vagrant
- Garnish accordingly with the Roach Motels
- Sprinkle liberally with words like “romance”, “eat to your heart’s content”, “nobody less than 150 kg admitted” and “free insulin as required”
- Add Chocolate
- Let simmer for 7-10 days and you’re done!
So in order to differentiate your chocolate festival - which is about getting the proles to your neck o’ the woods to spend all their money and develop/exacerbate an unhealthy eating addiction so they come back again – from the other guy’s festival about the exact same thing, you need a clever theme. At the very least, you’ll need a theme clever enough to convince everyone – that is you, the client and the visitors – that it’s not about…well all that other stuff mentioned above. The first thing to do is choose some container words for a theme. Such words should capture the longing for human contact that these lonely people have abjectly displaced with chocolate. Some good ones include love, lust, luxury, lasciviousness…pretty much anything beginning with an “L” and you’re in business.
And now a name is needed. You could go through some demented random stimulation exercises to come up with cool names that say what it’s all about without actually saying what it’s all about, because doing so just wouldn’t be cool. Unfortunately, the people investing in such a festival are not as concerned over design perceptions as they are having people show up and spend money. So, they normally have requirements like having the location in the name as well as the main ingredient. So now that a wonderfully over-themed festival concept has been sorted out, you have to include something clearly pointing out “Paramaribo” and “Chocolate”. Oh the sexy, sensual names just roll of the tongue, don’t they?
- Chocomaribo
- Paramarilate
- Para-choc
- Maribocolate
- The Paramaribo Chocolate Festival
- Susan (Sorry…Tick flashback)
And if you do come up with something remotely plausible, perhaps with some inappropriate though somewhat appealing pull-out-of-your-ass word play, you have to remember that even though this is for an international audience, making English is the default language, it also has to make sense at the Surinamers level of English, which may not be as high as they themselves think it is. In their defence though, it is higher than the French, Italian and Spanish levels combined.
So, the burning question:
How many creative people does it take to come up with a clever name for a chocolate festival?
Well as far as I can tell it hasn’t happened yet!
