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.
