Shakespeare was wrong, apparently. A rose by any other name would not smell as sweet according to Chevrolet’s staff or, more importantly, its customers.

Controversy was sparked in the States last week when a leaked GM Motors memo revealed that, for brand consistency, staff were to never use the name ‘Chevy’ when discussing the Chevrolet brand. “We’d ask that whether you’re talking to a dealer, reviewing dealer advertising or speaking with friends and family, that you communicate our brand as Chevrolet moving forward” it read.

The backlash from fans of Chevy – perceived as a quintessential American icon – has largely been covered in the US media with negativity. But have they missed the point? Could it be that Chevrolet have just pulled off one of the most masterfully subtle marketing campaigns in history?

The outpouring of love and devotion to the Chevy brand following the leak has been simply phenomenal. Within hours commentators and bloggers across the country began vehemently extolling the virtues of Chevy. “Chevy is as American as baseball and apple pie” declared one blogger. “I love you Chevy” wrote another. Across the world people were being reminded of Chevy’s central place in American culture, from featuring in Don McLean’s American Pie to being named dropped in songs by Snoop Dogg and The Beastie Boys.

The release of this simple one-page memo triggered the emergence of louder and more visible brand advocates than any multi-million dollar advertising campaign ever could. Suddenly thousands of individuals were tweeting Chevy’s core brand image with passion and for free. Was the memo a deliberate moment of genius from GM? Their subsequent backtrack over the issue – where they claimed the memo was “poorly worded” and that actually “we love Chevy” – may suggest so. If not, they must be the luckiest brand in the world right now.

As well as working on international brands, we also like to be there ‘at the birth’ of some smaller brands.

Our friends Pip and Ed Murray have started their own Shotover Brewery in Oxfordshire, which you can read more about here.  

We’re very proud of our involvement in helping to build this great little brand – and hopefully it demonstrates we do practice what we preach. It’s a great example of a beer positioned against some powerful trends of craftsmanship and provenance.  And the beer tastes great too…!

Enjoying the beer – Ed Murray and our Chairman, Paul Walton (L-R).

In this series of posts I aim to bring to light off-beat stories from the world of marketing, ranging from serious successes to downright abysmal failures.

To kick off the New Year I’ve got a triptych of brand names: the good, the bad and the ugly.

Starting with the good, I think Method deserve a mention for their range of bathroom cleaning products. There are some boring (though not necessarily bad) ones in there like ‘Daily Shower’ and ‘Flushable Wipes’ as well as some middle-weight contenders like ‘Tub Scrub.’ But the hands-down winner is the name they dared to give to their toilet cleaner: ‘Bowl Patrol’.

I think this is marvellous; it actually made me stop and laugh in the supermarket before briefly bowing my head in admiration. It’s funny, descriptive and above all breaks the category’s naming conventions. That means it will not only get noticed but gives itself a chance of being different enough to become loved. Not since Mr. Muscle has anyone launched as stunningly personality-driven a name as this in cleaning products and so I salute them.

The bad name is Rapiscan, a potential supplier of the full-body scanners at UK airports. As Nancy Friedman points out, the name is presumably the result of a portmanteau of ‘rapid’ and ‘scan’ and what Rapiscan want us to understand from that is that their scanning equipment is fast. But they should have done due diligence on this name. They really should have because media discussion of these scanners tends to have focused on people’s concerns with them. And those concerns tend to be less about how long these scanners will take to use than they are about the particular invasion of privacy that occurs when a stranger can see you naked without having asked first. And with that analogy to rape, there is a real danger the first syllable of their name won’t be pronounced ‘rap’ but ‘rape’. In that case all this name will do is exacerbate people’s fears and reinforce the barrier airport procurement staff may have to buying from them.

The final name is the ugly one: “The Beaver”. It’s the name of a venerable Canadian history magazine which has come a cropper in our internet age.

While under its own steam the word ‘beaver’ has acquired other meanings aside from the waterborne animal, the internet has blossomed as a conduit to porn and purveyors of other types of beaver. And that has meant that most of the magazine’s emails simply get diverted to subscribers’ junk email folders. As the magazine’s publisher has said “The Beaver has become an impediment online.”

So several moral tales for brand namers there: be brave, not stupid but always be prepared to find out that consumers will warp and interpret your work in a way you would never expect.