Made In America - Bill Bryson [158]
Huge amounts of effort go into choosing brand names. General Foods reviewed 2,800 names before deciding on Dreamwhip.16 (And to put this in proportion try to think of just ten names for an artificial whipped cream.) Ford considered more than 20,000 possible car names before finally settling on Edsel – which proves that such care doesn’t always pay – and Standard Oil a similar number before it opted for Exxon. Sometimes, however, the most successful names are the result of a moment’s whimsy. Betty Crocker came in a flash to an executive of the Washburn Crosby Company (later absorbed by General Mills), who chose Betty because he thought it sounded wholesome and sincere and Crocker in memory of a beloved fellow executive who had recently died. At first the name was used only to sign letters responding to customers’ requests for advice or information, but by the 1950s Betty Crocker’s smiling, confident face was appearing on more than fifty types of food product, and her loyal followers could buy her recipe books and even visit her ‘kitchen’ at the General Foods headquarters.
Even greater efforts go into finding out why people buy the brands they do. Advertisers and market researchers bandy about terms like conjoint analysis technique, personal drive patterns, Gaussian distributions, fractals, and other such arcana in their quest to winnow out every subliminal quirk of American buying habits. They know, for instance, that 40 per cent of all people who move to a new address will also change their brand of toothpaste, that the average supermarket shopper makes fourteen impulse decisions in each visit, that 62 per cent of shoppers will pay a premium for mayonnaise even when they think a cheaper brand is just as good, but that only 24 per cent will show the same largely irrational loyalty to frozen vegetables. To preserve a brand name involves a certain fussy attention to linguistic and orthographic details. To begin with, the name is normally expected to be treated not as a noun but as a proper adjective – that is, the name should be followed by an explanation of what it does: Kleenex facial tissues, Q-Tip cotton swabs, ]ell-O brand gelatin dessert, Sanka brand decaffeinated coffee. Some types of products – notably cars – are granted an exemption, which explains why General Motors does not have to advertise Cadillac self-driving automobiles or the like. In all cases, the name may not explicitly describe the product’s function, though it may hint at what it does. Thus Coppertone is acceptable; Coppertan would not be.
The situation is more than a little bizarre. Having done all they can to make their products household words, manufacturers must then in their advertisements do all in their power to imply that they aren’t. Before trademark law was clarified, advertisers positively encouraged the public to treat their products as generics. Kodak invited consumers to ‘Kodak as you go’, turning the brand name into a dangerously ambiguous verb. It would never do that now. The American Thermos Product Company went so far as to boast ‘Thermos is a household word’, to its considerable cost. Donald F. Duncan, Inc., the original manufacturer of the Yo-Yo, lost its trademark protection partly because it was amazingly casual about capitalization in its own promotional literature. ‘In case you don’t know what a yo-yo is ...’ one of its advertisements ran, suggesting that in commercial terms Duncan did not. Duncan also made the elemental error of declaring, ‘If It Isn’t A Duncan, It Isn’t a Yo-Yo’, which on the face of it would seem a reasonable claim, but was in fact held by the courts to be inviting the reader to consider the product generic.17 Kodak had long since stopped