Repeat After Me (And Then Repeat It Again): How Brands Turned Absurd Repetition Into a Marketing Superpower

Somewhere between the fifteenth time you hummed that insurance jingle in the shower and the moment you caught yourself quoting a fast-food slogan to absolutely no one, something happened to you. You became a vessel. A willing, singing, slightly embarrassed vessel for someone else's marketing budget. And here's the really unsettling part: you kind of loved it.

Welcome to the era of absurd repetition as brand strategy — a world where saying something ridiculous once is a gamble, but saying it forty-seven times is apparently a masterclass in consumer psychology. Buckle up, because we're going deep on this one.

The Method Behind the Madness (There Is One, We Promise)

Let's start with the obvious elephant in the room wearing a monocle and a jingle: Old Spice. If you were alive and online between 2010 and, well, right now, you've encountered Old Spice's relentless commitment to complete and total nonsense. The Man Your Man Could Smell Like didn't just run once. He ran everywhere, spawned spin-offs, responded to tweets in real-time, and somehow made body wash feel like an existential experience.

The genius wasn't the absurdity itself — it was the repetition of the absurdity. Each new iteration said, "Yes, we know this is insane. We're doing it again anyway." And that self-awareness created something powerful: a shared joke between the brand and its audience.

Marketing researchers call this the "mere exposure effect" — the psychological phenomenon where people develop a preference for things simply because they've encountered them repeatedly. But here's the Ricko Ricko twist: when the repeated thing is funny and weird, the effect compounds. You're not just familiar with it. You're in on it. You're part of the bit.

Ryan Reynolds Figured This Out and Won't Stop

If Old Spice is the founding father of absurd repetition marketing, Ryan Reynolds is its current reigning emperor. The man built an entire persona — and multiple businesses — around the idea of being conspicuously self-aware about his own marketing.

With Aviation Gin and Mint Mobile, Reynolds didn't just make ads. He made ads about making ads. He'd acknowledge the formula while executing the formula, winking at the camera so hard you'd think he pulled a muscle. His commercials went viral not because they were polished, but because they felt like they were in on the joke with you.

And then he'd do it again. Same energy, slightly different context, same knowing smirk. The repetition wasn't lazy — it was load-bearing. Each new ad reinforced the persona, deepened the bit, and reminded audiences that Reynolds and his brands existed in this specific, ridiculous creative universe.

The result? People sought out his commercials. They shared them. They quoted them. Aviation Gin sold for over $600 million. Mint Mobile sold to T-Mobile for $1.35 billion. Turns out the bit was also a business plan.

Why Your Brain Is Basically a Jingle Jukebox

Here's where things get genuinely interesting, and slightly concerning. Neuroscience has a lot to say about why repetitive, absurd content sticks so aggressively.

When something surprises us — a non-sequitur, an unexpected visual gag, a sentence that makes no grammatical sense but somehow works — our brains flag it as significant. It breaks pattern. It demands attention. Then, when that surprising thing repeats, our brains do something counterintuitive: instead of tuning it out, they start anticipating it. The absurdity becomes a ritual.

Think about Progressive's Flo. Think about the Geico Gecko. Think about whatever Wendy's is doing on Twitter at any given moment. These aren't accidents. They're carefully maintained absurdist universes designed to live rent-free in your frontal lobe.

The brands that nail this create what some marketers quietly call "earworm equity" — a kind of cognitive real estate where their specific flavor of weird has permanently set up shop in your memory. You don't just remember the brand; you remember the feeling of the brand's joke. And feelings drive purchasing decisions way more reliably than facts do.

But Does It Actually Work, or Are We All Just Exhausted?

Fair question. Because there's a dark side to this strategy, and it lives in your YouTube ad queue at 11 PM.

Absurd repetition only works when there's genuine craft behind the absurdity. When brands cargo-cult the form of quirky marketing without the underlying wit, you get something deeply painful: try-hard randomness. A brand Twitter account that posts "we're not like other brands 😈" and then aggressively hawks protein powder. A commercial that's weird for the sake of weird, with no actual comedic payoff.

The difference between Reynolds and a thousand failed imitators is that Reynolds' absurdism has internal logic. The joke makes sense within its own universe, even when it makes no sense in ours. That coherence is what makes repetition charming rather than grating.

Marketing analysts who track social engagement data have noted a consistent pattern: campaigns built around a single, well-executed absurd premise that gets repeated and evolved over time outperform one-off viral moments in long-term brand recall. The viral hit gets the spike. The running bit gets the loyalty.

The Ricko Ricko Principle Applied to Corporate America

Here at Ricko Ricko — a brand literally built on the comedic power of saying the same thing twice — we feel uniquely qualified to weigh in on this. (Twice the fun, double the Ricko. We stand by it.)

The repetition isn't the gimmick. The repetition is the point. When something is good, doubling it signals confidence. It says: we know this works, we're not hedging, we're committing fully to the bit. There's something almost aggressive about that kind of creative commitment, and audiences respond to it.

The brands winning the absurd repetition game aren't the ones shouting the loudest. They're the ones who found their specific weird frequency and then broadcast it consistently, confidently, and with enough self-awareness to keep it from curdling into desperation.

So Should Every Brand Just Start Being Weird?

Absolutely not. And that's kind of the point.

Absurd repetition as a marketing strategy only works if the absurdity is authentic to the brand's actual personality — or at least a personality they can credibly sustain. A regional accounting firm doing Old Spice-style fever-dream ads is not a marketing strategy. It's a cry for help.

But for brands with the creative infrastructure to build and maintain a genuinely funny, consistently weird universe? The data, the psychology, and frankly the entire career of one Ryan Reynolds suggests it's one of the most durable plays in modern marketing.

Say the ridiculous thing. Say it again. Say it with confidence. Make sure it's actually funny.

And maybe, just maybe, you'll end up living in someone's head rent-free — right next to the jingle they've been humming since 2009 and still can't fully explain.

Twice the fun, double the Ricko. You get it now.