Papa John's Slogan Slag

In honor of Papa John blaming NFL protests for his waning numbers I’ve decided to expose his stupid slogan and weak pizza and suggest that maybe people are starting to get a clue he’s a farce.

Everybody Wins (paper planes status):https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=68&v=IvUalsqWaMo

The logic is: “better pizza” is made using “better ingredients.” This causal bond appeals to people who have a sense of shame eating other delivery pizzas. Can you imagine Papa John using a quote like “Best Pizza in Town” to promote Papa John’s? It’s ridiculous without their papa pizza logic. The slogan plays on consumers’ fears that Pizza Hut and Big Dominoes are getting away with using bad ingredients. Our health obsessed society became paranoid about ingredients around the time Papa John’s started their miracle rise in the pizza industry. People assume that big corporations will do anything to make their pizza appealing. They believe simultaneously that bad ingredients make them want bad pizza and that better ingredients make better pizza. They believe Papa John’s Pizza does consider taste and health because he’s a holistic person. Papa stands next to the oven, shining his light on the world from behind the pizza island in the back of the store he still works at. This is his way of showing the world that he matters and that you matter. As if he’s somehow scientifically verified each pizza by placing it inside the hot oven. People think to themselves, “My gosh, if I could only find ingredients cheaply like Papa John’s I could be a rich man too.” The thoughts of people who’ve never actually bought frozen vegetables in their lives but really want to live better. If Papa John really wants a challenge he should take on Dean Kitchens in a bake-off. People feel deep inside that Papa is an anomaly. They convince themselves his pizza tastes good when it’s the worst of the bunch. His true motto is: Cheaper Ingredients. More Pizza. This is the insidious reality behind Papa John’s. Papa’s has more calories than Little Cesar’s, Pizza Hut, or Dominoes.

There are those pizza lovers out there who, despite knowingly sacrificing their health, consider themselves of discriminate taste when it comes to the food they love. Is there anything more tasty than a pizza? They might ask: Is there anything more important than the tastiness of a pizza? Health? But health is exactly what pizza isn’t and anyone who believes they can convince us it is is lying. Mr. Papa John would do anything to be like Big Dominoes or even The Hut but instead he acts like he’s better than them. No one knows this because everyone thinks pizza could be better. How Papa John’s uses this to seem like the honest red shirted fellow next to the oven is seriously bogus. He looks exactly the same as he did all those years ago before he was a wild success. This is not an honest person. It’s more honest to be changed by success than to remain the same. Only a liar can remain the same their whole existence like that. The arrogance of someone who thinks an entire pizza is drastically changed by adding canola oil is probably madly in love with himself and every trivial thing he does in life which never changes. The honest corporation leader is a thing of the past, perhaps Papa was the last of the “real-fake ones.”

Consumers have been telling themselves for years that Papa John’s was tastier when it wasn’t. Everything we’re told is filtered through our sensory experiences. I must explain to people that Papa John’s is crap you need to stop convincing yourself it’s good. Only by eating a bunch of other pizza can you find freedom from the Papa addiction. Oh wait, that’s why Papa’s is losing. Eaten by its own obvious logic that it completely exploited. Their website says, “Always Have. Always Will.” Which shows that the original slogan is one of complete arrogance. Are they always going to outsmart the competition or are their ingredients so awesome that they’ll never be forced to change? Papa’s love of logic took him to the top of the heap because not enough people questioned him. This is classic skepticism: people are too stupid to understand truth. Modern skepticism: culture, pizza, and art is all bogus and ultimately worthless. Papa John’s is an example of this play on skepticism Badiou describes in his Logic of Worlds (2008). There’s another essay that I plan on writing about the change of irony but it’s more serious and general.

A pizza is made better or worse by its ingredients, the baking process, and the tossing process. All the processes are stream-lined, standardized, and varied based on what the customer stipulates. Everyone understands that pizza is comprised by these three things. Papa John’s statement is nothing but a truism that they claim to have a deep and personal insight about. They use this supposed wisdom to make their pizza more robust and less healthy. If they imply better taste and health they need to back up their claims. Better Ingredients. Better Pizza. Can be true or false of any two pizzas that are compared and is quickly negated in the case of Papa John’s. It’s a truism that would work comparing one Papa John’s to another Papa John’s but they never would do that because it would backfire completely. It’s completely unfair to imply that other pizzas don’t care about their ingredients. Their slogan is arbitrary, often false, and hard to examine. People choose pizza on how it tastes and on how it makes them feel. People can care enough to hear the slogan and believe it but not take the time to investigate. The final point I want to make is David Lewis’ idea that Better Ingredients is Better Pizza. There is no “whole,” it’s only ingredients placed together in their space. The whole is the calorie count and how it affects your waistline. It’s an interesting idea that the parts make the whole instead of the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. It’s okay to make individual observations and not know how they fit until later. This is the work of the whole anyway.