An extract from Bill Bryson’s 1990 book ‘Mother Tongue‘ with added paragraph breaks to make it easier to read online.
Names are in the most literal senses big business. With the increasing globalization of commerce, it is becoming harder and harder to find brand names that are both inoffensive and pronounceable throughout the world.
Some idea of the scope of the problem can be seen in the experience of a British company when it decided to sell its vintage port, Cockburn’s Dry Tang, in Scandinavia. When it didn’t sell well in Sweden the company investigated and learned that ‘tang’ means ‘seaweed’ in Swedish, and clearly the name ‘dry seaweed’ was not conjuring up the requisite image of quality and premium taste that would lead Swedes to buy it by the sackful.
So, at the suggestion of Swedish importers, the company changed the name on the label to Dry Cock, which sounds very silly to English speakers, but which was a big hit with the Swedes.
However, sales immediately plummeted in Denmark. Urgent investigations showed that cock there signifies, of all things, the female genitalia. So yet another name had to be devised. Such are the hazards of international marketing.
Standard Oil, when it decided to change its name, considered Enco until it discovered that enco in Japanese means ‘stalled car’.
Gallaher’s, another British company, tried to market a cigarette called Park Lane in Spain, but without much success. It wasn’t that it meant anything offensive, but Spaniards simply couldn’t pronounce it and were embarrassed to order it.
On the other hand, companies do sometimes make something of a virtue of having unusual or difficult names, as with Häagen-Dazs ice cream in the United States, a name selected by its inventor simply because he thought it sounded exotic.
Extraordinary amounts of money and effort are sometimes pumped into the naming of products.
A typical example, cited by the Sunday Times, was of a Swiss confectionary company that commissioned the British trademark specialist John Murphy to come up with an arresting name for a new Swiss chocolate bar.
With the aid of a computer spewing out random names and of groups of specialists who do little more than sit around and think up possible names, Murphy’s firm came up with 350 suggestions. But of these the company rejected 302 because they weren’t considered sufficiently zippy and delectable, and of the forty-eight remaining possibilities only two were not registered somewhere in the world.
Murphy himself had the same problem His company is called Novamark in Britain but elsewhere trades as Inter Brand because the name was already taken.
Because of the difficulties, brand names are heavily defended. Rolls-Royce, the car group, deals with about 500 trademark infringement cases a year (mostly plumbers advertising themselves as ‘the Rolls-Royce of plumbers’ and that sort of thing).
Other companies have been less vigilant, or at least less successful.
Aspirin, cellophane, yo-yo, and escalator were all once brand names that lost their protection. Many words that are still brand names are often used by the public as if they were not. Band-Aid, Frisbee, Jell-O, Coke, Kleenex, Xerox, and, in England, Hoover, which has achieved the unusual distinction there of becoming the common term for both the appliance and the action (‘Did you hoover the carpet?’).
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If you are thinking of launching a new product yourself, I can tell you that among the names you cannot use are Sic, Pschitt, Plopp, and Super Piss. the first two are the names of soft drinks in France, the third is a chocolate bar in Taiwan, and the fourth is a Finnish de-icer. Sorry.
Did you know that naming brands and products are among the things copywriters do?. And it’s even harder now than it was in 1900 when the book was published.
If you need help, you know who to call…