Here's a little quiz. I say "Teenflo," you say:
A. "For those really hard-to-wean babies!"
Evenflo bottle-feeding products.
B. "For that time of the month ... with wings!"
C. "For chic, contemporary Canadian fashion!"
Give up? The correct answer is "C." Teenflo: the most misleading brand name in retail.
When the reviewers single out your restaurant's name for criticism before they get to the food, it's time to rethink the marketing strategy.
From the lead paragraph of a Tables for Two review in the September 12 New Yorker:
Having dinner at SHO Shaun Hergatt is almost a painful experience. It’s not that the food is so bad (in fact, it’s very, very good), or that it’s extraordinarily expensive (three courses for sixty-nine dollars), but, rather, that every other aspect of the undertaking is fraught with awkwardness. First, there’s the name—better to pick another place than to have to mutter those clunky syllables on the phone to a date. ...
New York Times restaurant critic Pete Wells was equally disparaging of the name in an August review:
SHO Shaun Hergatt is on the second floor of a condominium tower, but it’s hard to shake the feeling that a group of executives in some luxury hotel group’s headquarters dreamed up the whole enterprise, down to the un-mellifluous corporate name. Shaun Hergatt is the chef. It’s less clear who SHO is, or how he or she earned those capital letters.
Back in June, New York Journal, on online publication, provided some insights but awarded no stars for the name:
Then there’s the name. Shaun Hergatt is a fine chef, but he doesn’t have a New York footprint: his last outing here was as Gabriel Kreuther’s deputy at Atelier. The obscure Big O in “SHO” is the logo for the Setai, a $154 million, 166-unit condo conversion on Broad Street, just steps away from the stock exchange, where apartments are priced between $815,000 and $4,425,000.
Emphasis added in all cases.
In general, naming a restaurant after its chef is a risky gambit. It's celebrity worship disguised as branding; it speaks volumes about the chef's ego and very little about the customer experience. And what happens when that chef decides to pack up his whisks and mandolines—as star chefs are wont to do—and move on?
The food at SHO Shaun Hargatt looks pretty, though.
For a 107-year-old company beset by falling revenue, retail chain J.C. Penney is pursuing an admirably aggressive and forward-thinking strategy. It has more than 1,000 stores, its website is the largest in the United States, and in July it opened its first-ever Manhattan store, to cheers and sneers. Its Sephora stores-within-stores, introduced in 2006, bring a sophisticated range of cosmetics to mid-market shoppers.
But I have to wonder where the strategy was when Penney's named one of its private-label brands a.n.a.
According to the website and the ads, a.n.a. stands for "a new approach." But "ana" has another meaning known to many girls and women (including, I'd venture to say, a lot of women in fashion and retail): It's slang for the eating disorder anorexia nervosa. On the sickest end of the anorexia spectrum is the self-described pro-ana movement, often personified as a girl/woman named Ana. (The counterpart among bulimics is "pro-mia," personified as Mia.)
The coincidence, if that's what it is, was picked up by Consumerist, which quoted a reader: "This seems to be an interesting choice name for a new clothing campaign, especially since the term is still widely unknown except for those directly involved with anorexia & other eating disorders."
Then there's the commenter who wrote:
The 12-year-old who lives inside my brain understands and chortles at the accidental anorexia connection, but is tantalized more by the opportunity to scrawl a letter "L" in Sharpie beside all of the incidences of "a.n.a." that will appear on the store signage. I'm not proud.
With increasing attention on the role of too-thin fashion models in promoting eating disorders, Penney's brand-name choice seems misguided. And, given Penney's wholesome, Main Street image in the marketplace, it's more than a little perverse.
It's been cold and gray for weeks in the Bay Area: bad for Seasonal Affective Disorder, good for hunching over a warm computer and foraging for links. Such as these:
Remember those adverbial puns known as Tom Swifties? ("I'm losing my hair," Tom bawled.) They're (almost) all here, helpfully organized in alphabetical order.
Edmunds Daily picks the top 10 categories of stupid car names, including the oxymoronic Dodge Sprinter and the sounds-like-you're-from Boston Ford Kuga and Ford Ka. (Not on the list: my favorite Bad Car Name.)
Fork in the Road, a Village Voice food blog, lists words "that are so overused in food writing, they make our skin crawl."
Golden Gaytime ice cream bars? Yes, and 11 other Unfortunate Product Names, including Vergina beer, which I wrote about here. (Hat tip: Cooking with Amy on Twitter.) For a daily delivery of bad nomenclature, check out the Unfortunate Names Blog.
A Walk in the WoRds presents a short glossary of Simpsons neologisms, including "craptacular," "pointy kitty" (a rat), and my favorite, "knowitallism."
"It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news." Read about what happened. (Via Snarkmarket.)
I'm fascinated by this glossary of jewelry terms from Ideal Brilliance, a jewelry retailer. A torsade is "any strand of jewelry that can be worn twisted"; a YAG is an yttrium aluminum garnet, a synthetic substitute for a diamond.
One more: Just about everyone has blogged about it already, but in case you missed it, Pride and Twitterverse is a marvelous send-up of both Jane Austen and social media. Best if you've dabbled in Twitter yourself; certainly enhanced by familiarity with Austen's fiction.
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Photo swiped from CHUD, where it accompanies an interesting post about a Tom Swift movie that's in the works. Incredibly, it's the first Tom Swift movie in the character's history, which goes back to 1910, when the first Tom Swift novel was published.
Surely I'm not the only one...
...who reads this product name as Bum Pits.
A capitalized "I" would have helped. A little.
Available from Big Happie Hair (seriously), Walgreens, Amazon, HSN, and probably the taco truck downtown, too. The trademarked tagline: "Bump It Up!!!" Yes, three exclamation marks.*
Via Neil Kramer.
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* In the immortal words of Miss Mazeppa: If you wanna stump it, bump it with a trumpet.
I thought one solid week of Bad Brand Names would suffice for a while, but no: it's raining bad names. Please allow me to be your umbrella.
Smub is a new technology company with offices in Lyon, France, and Redwood City, California. Its principals are all French, and perhaps to their ears the name sounds charming or hip or clever. In English, I'm sorry to say, it falls between ludicrous and offensive. According to ReadWriteWeb, "Smub" is an acronym for "smart multi-use bookmarking," but that's no excuse.* There's nothing smart about this name.
Granted, the service itself sounds useful. Here's what ReadWriteWeb wrote:
Smub.it offers a drop-dead simple social sharing and bookmarking tool that proves especially useful for iPhone and other smart phone users. ... [It] requires only that users type "smub.it/" to the left of the URL they wish to bookmark or share. Then, whether it's viewed on a mobile device or a computer, the browser goes to Smub's ten-button interface where users are presented with a modest but functional selection of link-sharing options. The service effectively eliminates the need for copy/paste functions and takes a few steps out of iPhone users' sharing process.
Note the .it (Italy) domain extension, which turns "Smub" into an imperative: "Smub it!" Techies love this sort of verbification. Trademark lawyers, on the other hand, loathe it. They want us to use trademarked names as adjectives only: "the Smub social-sharing service."
But back to the name itself. What exactly is wrong with Smub? For starters, its sound—muffled, blunted, nasally congested—is in direct opposition to the streamlining purpose of the product. Not only that: In English, words that start with smu- have negative connotations: smudge, smut, smug. Smub is one consonant away from snub and not far from snob. Zero positive associations.
And let it not be overlooked that Smub is bums spelled backward.
From the looks of it, the Smub team has invested a lot of time and brainpower into an application with some genuine utility and elegance. Why not expend just a quarter of that energy on the name?
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* I was unable to find this definition on the Smub site or blog.
This makes me a little crazy:
The spelling, I mean:
Lil' Drums.
That is just wrong.
If you're doing a folksy rendering of "little," the spelling is Li'l: L-I-apostrophe-L. As in Li'l Abner, Li'l Friends, and Li'l Folks, the first comic strip by Peanuts creator Charles Schultz Schulz.
There's a historical reason for this spelling, although it isn't addressed by the rules you learned in school. Unlike the apostrophe in contractions such as don't, wouldn't, or he's; or the possessive apostrophe in Abner's (singular) and folks' (plural); or the apostrophe-of-omission in fo'c'sle (forecastle) or bo's'n (for boatswain), the apostrophe in li'l doesn't represent a missing letter—even though three letters are indeed missing.¹ Its function is to create something called eye dialect: nonstandard spelling that approximates a pronunciation that's not much different from the standard, but gives the reader the impression of "dialect, foreign, or uneducated speech" (per Wikipedia). The apostrophe represents "flapping," that thing we do with the t sound in little so that it almost disappears.
This special apostrophe has a wonderful name all its own: the apologetic apostrophe. It shows up in Scots words such as ta'en (taken) to suggest that a letter is missing. It isn't: the word was originally spelled tane. Unapologetically Anglocentric Brits, however, inserted the apostrophe to "prove" that Scots was a degraded form of "pure English."
So where did my Oakland neighbor Dreyer's², which owns the Drumsticks brand, get the apostrophe-at-the-end "Lil'"?
I blame rap music.
Consider Lil' Kim, Lil' 1/2 Dead, Lil' Fizz, Lil' Jon, and Lil' Malik (now known as Mr. Malik). Wikipedia has compiled a much longer list of Lil' rappers.
This is apostrophe abuse, plain and simple.³ What's the function of that terminal apostrophe? Does it represent a missing letter? Is Kim's real name Lily? Or Lilt? Is Mr. 1/2 Dead honoring the French city of Lille?
Or is it mere ornamentation—the orthographic equivalent of a hood ornament?
I doubt very much that it's apologetic. I mean, have you seen Lil' Kim?
Don't even get me started on Lil Wayne, né Dwayne Michael Carter, Jr. Perhaps in homage to the Mae West vehicle Diamond Lil, he dispenses with the apostrophe altogether.
Eccentric or nonstandard spellings may be part of the rap brand. But Dreyer's has no excuse for its errant apostrophe. I beg you, Dreyer's, think of the children! You know: the li'l ones.
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¹ Yes, the possessive apostrophe represents a missing letter. Long ago, English had a genitive case equivalent to the one in German; "of/belonging to the man" was spelled mannes. As pronunciation changed, the -es contracted into 's.
² Sold as Edy's on the East Coast.
³ For a different strain of apostrophe abuse, see "There's an Apostrophe in There Somewhere," in Arnold Zwicky's blog.
Tremble in awe before the Shiva sandal from German shoemaker Think! (exclamation point theirs):
It's awfully festive for the seven-day Jewish period of mourning.
And it doesn't look like anything the Hindu god Shiva (the Destroyer of the World) would be caught reincarnated in.
Shoe-style names often exist in a parallel universe governed by designers' egos and littered with zany mis-translations. Readers of this blog may remember the Stupa (which bore the name of a Buddhist tomb), the Weirda (a decidedly un-weird, indeed pedestrian slip-on), and the Nervous (a driving shoe!).
So, sure, there's plenty of precedent. But I still think Think! should have thought twice before choosing this name. The shoe may fit, but the name doesn't.
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P.S. None of this commentary is meant to disparage the quality of Think! shoes, which in my experience is superb. I do, however, have another complaint about the company's nomenclature. Think! assigns a word name to each last (the shape on which the shoe is built) and a frustrating five-digit string of numbers to differentiate style variations. This particular Shiva sandal, for example, is actually the Shiva 82523. Then there's the Julia 82337, the Julia 82340, the Julia 82330, and so on. This naming convention may be useful within the company (I'm guessing the first number is a seasonal code), but it's mystifying, memory-defying, and pointless for customers.
