Alka-Seltzer

Cardboard, sodium bi-carbonate

2000

Museum Collection

Alka-Seltzer’s advertising campagin demonstrates the importance of the double expression as a mnemonic device: the idea, which is an important feature of every language laboratory, that repitition leads to memorization.Yet, besides capitalizing on the double expression — “plop-plop, fizz-fizz” — to sell twice as many tablets, each Alka-Seltzer package contains two tablets where there ought to be only one.

As a result, Alka-Seltzer doubles its marketing potential by appealing to thrifty consumers looking for a bargain — the desperate soul in search of a “freebie,” who modestly takes advantage of the two tablets provided in one package on two separate occasions — and to excessive consumers interested only in bulk, Biggie, or Jumbo items — the glutton who enjoys more medication than is necessary to cure his/her ailments, or gets-off on the delirium that only two tablets of Alka-Seltzer can provide.

Though it would be just as easy to manufacture one large tablet of equal strength, the rise of Alka-Seltzer is evidence that consumers like myths of double-strength. Alka-Seltza offers their consumers the option of making this myth a reality through the physical activity involved in adding to one’s glass the second tablet. The second plop/fizz is music to the consumer’s ears, the leitmotif that guarantees satisfaction.

Moreover, the Alka-Seltzer jingle makes use of another type of doubling called the couplet: two successive lines of verse usually rhyming and of the same length:

“Plop-plop, fizz-fizz,

Oh, what a relief it is.”