By Mark Tennent in Reader
Posted in Uncategorized on March 13, 2009 at 11:29 am
Walking past Beales the other day and there, in the window, is a range of tomato red cookware named Provence. Even if you never visit that part of the world, the name conjures up images of red wine, blazing hot sun and olive groves, the cicada’s calls so loud they almost hurt your ears.
Would the people in Provence look in a shop window and be attracted by a new frying pan called Grimsby or Sellafield. The name being to them, some foreign and unknown place with mystical overtones. So where did Intel get Nehalem from and why use it for the name of a chip? What images are supposed to flood into our minds?
Naming products has always been a funny game. It used to be de rigueur for pubs to display that well-known brand of Spanish potato crisps called Bum, or the Belgium brew called Bolleke – which is very funny to us Brits. Just like the French fizzy drinks brand Pschitt and the Swedish Kräpp toilet tissue. Where on earth were Nintendo coming from with Wii, or is that only funny to Brits as well?
The car industry, being international, has always been open to the problem. The Ford Pinto means the Ford Penis in Brazil, the Mitsubishi Pajero is the Mitsubishi Masturbator in Spain and the Toyota Fiera will be the Toyota Old Woman in Puerto Rico. Not quite as bad as the Opel Ascona which is the Opel female genitalia in parts of Spain and Portugal.
Porsche, the highly successful stock-options firm mentioned in this Financial Times article here have a side-line in making sports cars. They have partly solved naming problems by sticking to the same names, or more correctly, numbers. Their 911 model has been on sale in various guises since 1964.
There is a sneaking suspicion that Americans spend as much time creating the acroynms as they do the companies and organisations. Would NASA still be named after its initial capitals if they were called the American Research in Space Executive, is there a Digital Research Users Group and will Microsoft come up with a Computer for Reading All Programs?
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