Creativity Gone Wrong

I saw this sign today, and I just had to share it.  It was the store name for a bakery, displayed prominantly over the door: "Nothing Bundt Cakes".

Now, I definitely have very specific opinions when it comes to creativity, and what ideas are good and which ones are bad and I'm sure the person who thought this up felt pretty clever.  Lord knows I've come up with some pretty stupid ideas in the past that I felt deserved a whole lot more attention and validation than they merited... but there are three distinct reasons why I'm particular annoyed by this one:

1) I generally vote against almost any sign/slogan/ad/title that uses a pun.  With a few exceptions, and usually the exceptions are in the form of a commercial where the stupidness of the pun is sort of assumed by the surrounding context.  In this case, the pun isn't just the slogan, it's the store name!  I just wonder what kind of cheesy people run a place with a name like that?


2) The purpose of a pun is to mix words together that can mean two different things.  For example, if I made a comment in this post like "this store really 'takes the cake'", it would be funny (to some other than me because I hate puns) because 'takes the cake' can mean taking an actual piece of cake (which is one of the main ideas of the post) or a phrase intended as a complement towards the subject of the statement.  Well, "Nothing Bundt Cakes" thus should have two meanings, the obvious one is the play on "Nothing But Cakes", which makes tons of sense, and the other is "Nothing Bundt Cakes" which means....what??  Bundt cakes made out of nothing?  That makes it sound like the bundt cakes suck!

3) The store obviously served more than just bundt cakes.  But, personally, I've never had a friggin bundt cake that I liked, so I'm not going to step a single foot into that bakery.  Especially since the the title "Nothing Bundt Cakes" implies that they sell nothing but bundt cakes!

Anyways, my expressed frustration here is supposed to be jovial, so it's not like I'm going to lose sleep over this, but sometimes I think "if they'd just consulted a marketing person for 5 minutes they could've avoided such a silly idea!".  Hahaha.  Maybe the fact that it's silly will get them the attention they need to boost their business?  You never know...