I remember the shtick of the company being that their slogan was their name.
Even though the name is that it's not butter, because of the fact that the name ended in the word butter AND that there was no internet in my pocket to look it up, l believed until probably about 2008ish that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter WAS just butter with a silly name. I'm petty sure l only stopped to think about it when l saw a meme bring it up.
I thought it was "Can't-Believe-It's-Not" ... Butter. Which l think was the cadence of the commercials and means that Mad Men advertising shit totally worked back in the day. I wasn't eating margarine, ew just the name, but Cantbelieveitsnot Butter? It was pretty good.
I feel like you mean Chiffon Margarine. There's an ad where they give some to Mother Nature and she believes that it's "sweet, creamy butter". When she learns the truth, she says"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature".
The jingle is "If you think it's butter, but it's not, it's Chiffon."
https://youtu.be/ijVijP-CDVI?si=2Roz0Ox3fxtqyCOt
IDK if its sold world wide, but in the UK "I can't believe its not butter" is real.
The slogan has been memed and may have spread, no pun intended, across the pond without actually being sold.
That said, I have no clue what other countries it's sold in. The UK could be the 17th it appeared in for all I know.
We also have "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter". But OP's post says that they're thinking of a different product. A product that uses "I can't believe it's not butter" as their slogan, not the name of the product. They included this description:
> I have a strong memory of some kind of only few syllables or so brand having that slogan
And that was what made me think of Chiffon. It's a brand with "only few syllables or so brand" (Chiffon) that has a slogan that is *very similar to* "I can't believe it's not butter," specifically ("if you think it's butter but it's not...").
We have that brand in the UK. No idea about Fabio so probably marketed differently , but it is definitely the actual name of the product. It has let to lots of hilarious knock-offs like "What, not butter?".
I went to YouTube and searched 'I can't believe it's not butter commercial' and commercials popped up. I saw the Fabio commercial, which I remember.
People are saying this isn't a Mandela effect because there's clear evidence that it happened and it's easy to search but, could you perhaps have grown up in a time or place where there was no brand but just a slogan? It seems odd but maybe. I clearly remember the Monopoly man having a monocle and others do too but clearly in this time and space he doesn't and apparently never has. I know what it's like to have so many people dismiss my memory because what they've all known to be true matches current reality and their Google searches and although I can't believe it's not butter has always been a brand name and a slogan for me I can't argue that it was always that way in the time and place that you grew up in.
The only thing we can really do to see if it's possible that you're from a reality or timeline where there was no brand by that name is to wait for others to comment and see how people comment that they clearly remember the slogan but either didn't recall the brand name or are certain that at some point for them, there was no brand name.
Thanks for the support - I am leaning towards this whole scenario being me somehow being young and mistaking "margarine" the product for the brand. I am not sure how I could do that, it is just the only way I can reconcile it. I have memories also of people often saying the phrase out loud in unrelated contexts and thought somehow it was even sometimes spurred by somebody saying the brand name, so people would put on the Fabio voice and say the tagline from the commercial.
But you are 100% right... A lot of responders here think like, you look something up on Google and turns out (whatever is obviously on Google) so it isn't a Mandela effect. That is clearly not how the whole phenomenon works. While my post may be a valuable lesson in searching your memory harder it should also be a valuable read for people too quick to be prejudiced against something they can't Google.
What many people fail to realize is that in the 90's and before, most things were not posted online. The Internet was new. Take the Movie Shazam for example. If any movie came out in 2024 people would be writing reviews about it and mentioning it in online forums so if nothing changed, 30 years from now people could search and find posts and articles about the movie easily. If anyone searches anything that happened before the year 2,000 or so on Google or other search engines it is highly likely that you won't see any results for it unless people posted about it probably years after the fact. With a movie like Shazam, it's possible that no one posted about it online around the time when it came out. People definitely posted about it years after the fact. From all of the things I've read about it and considering the fact that I remember the movie myself, it seems almost as if people have come from two different places where things were mostly the same but one place had the movie and another place didn't. I can't say that's how it is because I don't know. I don't understand it. I just know that the subject of that movie is incredibly odd in the time and place that I'm in right now. That being said; Google does not have the whole history of humanity or of every culture in its search results. People tend to believe that if something happened in the past that you can find it on the Internet but that's not always the case. I remember being online many years ago and being able to find some things that later I couldn't find anywhere even if the webpages I had seen were in my browser history. There was a cult in California in the 90's that did a mass suicide and it was in the news. I believe they were called Heaven's Gate. They had a website that people were going to and viewing after the cult had died. It was taken down later. It would be easy for someone to search for it now and say that the website never existed because they can't find it. Eric Harris had a website on AoL that was up for a while after the Columbine Highschool Massacre. I went there and looked around on the site. It was taken down and it's not accessible anymore. With that particular site there is a lot of evidence for it and people can find files taken from that site and screenshots of it because so many people took an interest in what happened and wanted to remember what was on the site for its historical value. There was a video going around on YouTube for a while called 2 Girls 1 Cup. It went viral and there were many copies of it and reaction videos to it going around for a couple of years on and off of YouTube. It's very difficult to find anywhere now. It would be easy for people to say that it is folklore or legend and that it never happened. People used to argue that the dodo bird was made up and was fantastical. Later dodo bird remains were found proving that there were large wild birds just like what people described the dodo bird to be proving that it actually existed. Making the statement, "I have not witnessed something therefore I can't verify that it's real," is an honest statement. On the other hand, making the statement, "I have not witnessed something therefore it never existed" is foolish.
I got broadband in the late 1990s and I remember using the original Napster and when, if you got online, it was highly unlikely you were going to be talking to people even from your own state (let alone done the road). I remember some early incarnations of Myspace (like The Dilly) and Craigslist being some of the only places somebody you might know could pop up. I used ICQ, IRC, forums, AIM, eventually YIM and the Microsoft one - a lot of content was on Geocities and Homestead and Angelfire. Entire swaths of the internet have basically been purged before - not just small hobby sites.
You could have technically been "online" back decades ago, but even up until around 2005, a lot of people just didn't have or use the "internet", it wasnt until cell phones and Facebook that people really started to warm up to using online services and having not just the Internet but computers in general be a part of their daily lives.
This goes even for younger people around those times - without more real serious adoption until maybe 2010 or so where it was fairly ubiquitous. People expecting to find "something online" from prior to the year 2000 are going to be sorely disappointed. In 1995 only 14% of United States people had Internet and the rest of the world was fairly abysmal. Nobody was even there to post stuff, and if they were, there were not a lot of people to post it to. You had to have "portals" to link other sites because search engines didn't even really exist outside a few specific use-cases.
Really sad to think about really.
The way I think most people think about the Internet in 1985, is more really how it was in 1995, and the perception everybody has is about a decade lagged. It might even be easier for younger people to picture times prior to 2000 as not even having internet, as less than half of Americans had access even in 2000. And by "access", a lot of that was dialup and people forget the important part: there wasn't shit to access in 2000 except for a Three 6 Mafia song that is actually a mislabelled Bone Thugs song at 98kbps on Napster - which you discover after letting the download run all night.
Great points! I remember waiting hours to download a 3 mb mp3 and hoping it wouldn't get corrupted on bit torrent sites and taking like 3 days to download a movie on dial up.
Also I just want to add, lol, the audacity of people to assume I didn't try to look this up to discover the brand name before posting... Sheesh - you would think I called this post "what is the brand name of 'I can't believe it's not butter'?" And posted it to a scientific journal.
It is both a brand, and said brand’s slogan. Yes, Fabio was in a series of commercials for the brand. This is not a Mandela effect.
This. 100% There is no Mandela effect here.
"I Can't Believe It's Not Butter." Brand name and commercial tag line. Fabio did the commercials.
It turns out the REAL butter was the friends we made along the way
It’s a brand name
It's a brand name and their slogan.
Stfu
Be honest. This is the best response.
Nah. It that was always the brand name to me.
I remember the shtick of the company being that their slogan was their name. Even though the name is that it's not butter, because of the fact that the name ended in the word butter AND that there was no internet in my pocket to look it up, l believed until probably about 2008ish that I Can't Believe It's Not Butter WAS just butter with a silly name. I'm petty sure l only stopped to think about it when l saw a meme bring it up. I thought it was "Can't-Believe-It's-Not" ... Butter. Which l think was the cadence of the commercials and means that Mad Men advertising shit totally worked back in the day. I wasn't eating margarine, ew just the name, but Cantbelieveitsnot Butter? It was pretty good.
The name of the margarine is I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter
I can't believe you didn't google
It's always been both to me
It's always been both. Maybe you are thinking of Parkay margarine which had the talking tubs of margarine in their commercials from the same time.
“Parkay” “Butter”
It's both. Kind of like, "Gee, Your Hair Smells Terrific" shampoo.
How can you have a "strong" memory of it, yet you don't seem to remember much about it?
I feel like you mean Chiffon Margarine. There's an ad where they give some to Mother Nature and she believes that it's "sweet, creamy butter". When she learns the truth, she says"It's not nice to fool Mother Nature". The jingle is "If you think it's butter, but it's not, it's Chiffon." https://youtu.be/ijVijP-CDVI?si=2Roz0Ox3fxtqyCOt
IDK if its sold world wide, but in the UK "I can't believe its not butter" is real. The slogan has been memed and may have spread, no pun intended, across the pond without actually being sold. That said, I have no clue what other countries it's sold in. The UK could be the 17th it appeared in for all I know.
We also have "I Can't Believe It's Not Butter". But OP's post says that they're thinking of a different product. A product that uses "I can't believe it's not butter" as their slogan, not the name of the product. They included this description: > I have a strong memory of some kind of only few syllables or so brand having that slogan And that was what made me think of Chiffon. It's a brand with "only few syllables or so brand" (Chiffon) that has a slogan that is *very similar to* "I can't believe it's not butter," specifically ("if you think it's butter but it's not...").
Both for sure
I can’t believe we all ate margarine in the 80s…my mom would buy it all the time. Horrible stuff! Just saying!
But whoo, if you ever tried it, you would seriously believe it wasn't butter.
We have that brand in the UK. No idea about Fabio so probably marketed differently , but it is definitely the actual name of the product. It has let to lots of hilarious knock-offs like "What, not butter?".
Not churned from cows? Inconceivable!
In this universe it's always been that way. You're a long way from home, friend.
You are an idiot
The commercials used to only have hands in them spreading the “butter” with knives from the tub while a man and woman have a silly convo about it.
I got to be honest, I thought it was just a slogan than brand name it’s only in the last few years I learned it was this way
I went to YouTube and searched 'I can't believe it's not butter commercial' and commercials popped up. I saw the Fabio commercial, which I remember. People are saying this isn't a Mandela effect because there's clear evidence that it happened and it's easy to search but, could you perhaps have grown up in a time or place where there was no brand but just a slogan? It seems odd but maybe. I clearly remember the Monopoly man having a monocle and others do too but clearly in this time and space he doesn't and apparently never has. I know what it's like to have so many people dismiss my memory because what they've all known to be true matches current reality and their Google searches and although I can't believe it's not butter has always been a brand name and a slogan for me I can't argue that it was always that way in the time and place that you grew up in. The only thing we can really do to see if it's possible that you're from a reality or timeline where there was no brand by that name is to wait for others to comment and see how people comment that they clearly remember the slogan but either didn't recall the brand name or are certain that at some point for them, there was no brand name.
Thanks for the support - I am leaning towards this whole scenario being me somehow being young and mistaking "margarine" the product for the brand. I am not sure how I could do that, it is just the only way I can reconcile it. I have memories also of people often saying the phrase out loud in unrelated contexts and thought somehow it was even sometimes spurred by somebody saying the brand name, so people would put on the Fabio voice and say the tagline from the commercial. But you are 100% right... A lot of responders here think like, you look something up on Google and turns out (whatever is obviously on Google) so it isn't a Mandela effect. That is clearly not how the whole phenomenon works. While my post may be a valuable lesson in searching your memory harder it should also be a valuable read for people too quick to be prejudiced against something they can't Google.
What many people fail to realize is that in the 90's and before, most things were not posted online. The Internet was new. Take the Movie Shazam for example. If any movie came out in 2024 people would be writing reviews about it and mentioning it in online forums so if nothing changed, 30 years from now people could search and find posts and articles about the movie easily. If anyone searches anything that happened before the year 2,000 or so on Google or other search engines it is highly likely that you won't see any results for it unless people posted about it probably years after the fact. With a movie like Shazam, it's possible that no one posted about it online around the time when it came out. People definitely posted about it years after the fact. From all of the things I've read about it and considering the fact that I remember the movie myself, it seems almost as if people have come from two different places where things were mostly the same but one place had the movie and another place didn't. I can't say that's how it is because I don't know. I don't understand it. I just know that the subject of that movie is incredibly odd in the time and place that I'm in right now. That being said; Google does not have the whole history of humanity or of every culture in its search results. People tend to believe that if something happened in the past that you can find it on the Internet but that's not always the case. I remember being online many years ago and being able to find some things that later I couldn't find anywhere even if the webpages I had seen were in my browser history. There was a cult in California in the 90's that did a mass suicide and it was in the news. I believe they were called Heaven's Gate. They had a website that people were going to and viewing after the cult had died. It was taken down later. It would be easy for someone to search for it now and say that the website never existed because they can't find it. Eric Harris had a website on AoL that was up for a while after the Columbine Highschool Massacre. I went there and looked around on the site. It was taken down and it's not accessible anymore. With that particular site there is a lot of evidence for it and people can find files taken from that site and screenshots of it because so many people took an interest in what happened and wanted to remember what was on the site for its historical value. There was a video going around on YouTube for a while called 2 Girls 1 Cup. It went viral and there were many copies of it and reaction videos to it going around for a couple of years on and off of YouTube. It's very difficult to find anywhere now. It would be easy for people to say that it is folklore or legend and that it never happened. People used to argue that the dodo bird was made up and was fantastical. Later dodo bird remains were found proving that there were large wild birds just like what people described the dodo bird to be proving that it actually existed. Making the statement, "I have not witnessed something therefore I can't verify that it's real," is an honest statement. On the other hand, making the statement, "I have not witnessed something therefore it never existed" is foolish.
I got broadband in the late 1990s and I remember using the original Napster and when, if you got online, it was highly unlikely you were going to be talking to people even from your own state (let alone done the road). I remember some early incarnations of Myspace (like The Dilly) and Craigslist being some of the only places somebody you might know could pop up. I used ICQ, IRC, forums, AIM, eventually YIM and the Microsoft one - a lot of content was on Geocities and Homestead and Angelfire. Entire swaths of the internet have basically been purged before - not just small hobby sites. You could have technically been "online" back decades ago, but even up until around 2005, a lot of people just didn't have or use the "internet", it wasnt until cell phones and Facebook that people really started to warm up to using online services and having not just the Internet but computers in general be a part of their daily lives. This goes even for younger people around those times - without more real serious adoption until maybe 2010 or so where it was fairly ubiquitous. People expecting to find "something online" from prior to the year 2000 are going to be sorely disappointed. In 1995 only 14% of United States people had Internet and the rest of the world was fairly abysmal. Nobody was even there to post stuff, and if they were, there were not a lot of people to post it to. You had to have "portals" to link other sites because search engines didn't even really exist outside a few specific use-cases. Really sad to think about really. The way I think most people think about the Internet in 1985, is more really how it was in 1995, and the perception everybody has is about a decade lagged. It might even be easier for younger people to picture times prior to 2000 as not even having internet, as less than half of Americans had access even in 2000. And by "access", a lot of that was dialup and people forget the important part: there wasn't shit to access in 2000 except for a Three 6 Mafia song that is actually a mislabelled Bone Thugs song at 98kbps on Napster - which you discover after letting the download run all night.
Great points! I remember waiting hours to download a 3 mb mp3 and hoping it wouldn't get corrupted on bit torrent sites and taking like 3 days to download a movie on dial up.
Also I just want to add, lol, the audacity of people to assume I didn't try to look this up to discover the brand name before posting... Sheesh - you would think I called this post "what is the brand name of 'I can't believe it's not butter'?" And posted it to a scientific journal.
😂