Quick Hits: Naming and Branding News

Mickey Mouse forced to work again due to harsh economy.

What happens when your product naming is deceptive? Well, you might be criticized by consumer advocates and chastised by the Federal Trade Commission. You might even end up in a feature story in the New York Times. At least that’s what happened to FreeCreditReport.com whose service can sometimes be far from free.

Disney is in the process of rebranding their iconic character for a new Nintendo Wii game. The new Mickey will be less adorable, which is fitting for the apocalyptic landscape of the game Epic Mickey. No more Mr. Nice Mouse.

If the name Ticketmaster elicits dark feelings in you after all the years of extra fees, then you might be a future fan of the fledgling startup Eventbrite. The site offers online event planning and promotion tools as well as ticket sales, and while they do take a small cut of most ticket sales, they don’t charge a service fee for free events.

eBay has removed the auction listing of 19-year-old Calvin Gosz trying to sell his naming rights. This isn’t the first time eBay has stepped between a name seller and potential bidders .

The house that Bob Marley built

...my head feels funny

by Mars Riley

It may have taken 18 years, but the family of Bob Marley is now getting serious about the use of his name and image. This is not going to be an easy task. As anyone who has been to a street fair, beach boardwalk, or head shop can tell you – bootlegged Bob Marley merchandise is everywhere. In fact, it is hard to imagine these places without it.

“You’re never going to stop the guys in the streets, flea markets … but you try as much as you can,” said Hilco Consumer Capital CEO, Jamie Salter. His company has been hired by the Bob Marley family to control the naming and image rights of the deceased reggae star.

Rohan Marley explained. “The family managed all the rights before Hilco was brought on board. We didn’t have a real good grasp on the international scope prior to Hilco, nor the proper management.”

Hilco’s plan has been to create a new brand called “House of Marley,” which will be an umbrella for all official merchandising and existing brands (Catch a Fire, Bob Marley, Three Little Birds, One Love, and Tuff Gong), and police the trademark vigilantly.

Last year unlicensed products were estimated to have generated $600 million in sales, whereas legally licensed items only did $4 million. Hilco’s projections are for the Bob Marley name to be a $1 billion brand within three years. Considering Bob had thirteen children and they have families of their own, the pie will probably be cut into pretty thin pieces.

The planned “House of Marley” merchandise is expected to be available mid-2010. Rumors are that it will include musical instruments, coffee, coffeehouses, restaurants, headphones, shoes, backpacks, stationary, videogames and, snowboards. What? You haven’t seen those pictures of Marley shredding powder in the Swiss Alps? (Neither have I.)

Nothing has been said about officially branded ganja, rolling papers or bongs—but one can hope. If they don’t license it, I’m sure it will still be easy to find the bootlegged versions. And if the “House of Marley” ever considers opening a Bob Marley theme park, let me suggest Venice Beach boardwalk. It practically is one already.

What your Halloween candy says about you

They're here... and they're hungry.

by Jeffery Racheff

Halloween is a magical time of year, especially if you’re a kid. It’s the one time when you can act like a blood-crazed zombie ninja without someone prescribing you Ritalin for the rest of your youth. Most importantly, however, it’s when you get to eat buckets of candy. Sweet treats are the end-all-be-all of childhood, so Halloween is the day when a youngster’s dreams come true.

But as any kid will tell you, not all candy was created equal. And it appears parents would agree.

In a recent Nielsen analysis, it was found that folks aren’t skimping when it comes to the candy they dole out from their doorsteps. Sales of brand-name candy are up, showing that parents (and even that one creepy guy who turns off all his lights and puts a bowl full of Starbursts on his porch with a note that says “TAKE ONE,” but no one’s watching so of course you take two handfuls) are passing up the generic store-brands even in a down economy. On average the generics hold a larger share of the market year-round, but Halloween season is different.

It’s interesting to think about why people make these choices. After all, these are products that consumers are buying for complete strangers. So does that mean candy-buyers are just grabbing their own favorite brands and hoping for leftovers? Or are they aware of how they’re perceived when trick-or-treaters bring their offerings back to the neighborhood parents? I can’t help but picture little Johnny Spongebob Squarepants waddling up to the new family’s doorstep, gurgling out a “twick-er-tweet,” then scrambling back to mom who then inspects her child’s latest prize to see how cheap the Petersens are and whether or not she should invite Trisha to the women’s weekly Scrabble game. Or is that too Desperate Housewivesy?

Either way, the fear of being seen as cheap is definitely a big motivation. A shopper browsing the supermarket aisles for food will usually pick old favorites or whatever is on sale, but trick-or-treat candy is a serious purchase because it is going to potentially represent you to your community. That’s why folks looking to impress the neighborhood will hand out Toblerones. School teachers give out little boxes of Nerds in the hopes that they will encourage good study skills. Grandma’s dish out Werthers and Necco wafers because, well, they’re old.

For the big brands, A large reason why they’re more successful during the Halloween season is because of price reductions and sales—something that consumers tend to take advantage of. But the winners in this scenario, other than big candy brands, are the kids. If big brand candy is what they want, we should give it to them. The last thing we need right now is a nation full of disgruntled trick-or-treaters.

Quick Hits: Naming and Branding News

Apple's proposed new Chicago light rail station.

iPod, iTouch, iPhone…iTrain? Riders of Chicago’s Red Line may soon be pulling into an Apple train station, as budget woes of the Chicago Transit Authority lead them into talks with Apple. In exchange for up to $4 million, Apple could receive exclusive advertising and naming rights at the North/Clybourn station.

The newest debate in healthcare reform isn’t over taxes, fees, or insurance lobbyists, but rather what to name the so-called “public option.” Nancy Pelosi suggested that better word choice could create greater understanding of the option. Her choice? The “consumer option.”

The city of Vancouver is launching a seven-month zero-budget project to rebrand Southwest Washington. Like a popular t-shirt sold at a local souvenir shop says, “Vancouver, not B.C., Washington, not D.C.” Local residents are tired of the confusion, so they are volunteering their time to the marketing effort, which will wrap up by June of 2010, in time for the Republican and Democratic conventions.

It isn’t easy to name a car that will be marketed in many languages and Nissan’s latest is no exception. Some say it’s a minor miracle that the name “Leaf” was cleared by lawyers in as many as 200 countries.

Whose team are you really on?

Whose team are you on LL?

by Eli Altman

Red Sox hats used to only be navy and red. Giants hats used to only be black and orange. Now you can get all 30 team hats in almost any color combo you want including the colors of some of their rivals. It’s a little confusing and I think it deteriorates team brands.

In sports, team colors are as important, if not more important, than team logos. If you’re going to the stadium and you aren’t a big enough fan to have actual team apparel, the next best thing is wearing team colors. This is pretty common practice. So while a logo is front and center on baseball caps, it only occupies about five percent of the hats total area. The rest of the hat is just team colors. So when you’re sitting in the stands at Wrigley, it’s a lot easier to see Rich Harden’s blue hat than the small red ‘C’ on the front of it—particularly if you’re not signing over your paycheck for seats right behind the plate.

Now, most of these hats are designed for fans and not for players. But if I see someone across the street wearing a blue hat with white lettering on it, I’m going to assume they’re a Dodgers fan—not a color-agnostic Giants fan. The same goes for fans at games. Usually you can take a quick glance around the stadium and get a reasonable approximation of how many visiting fans showed up by looking for their colors. This is also prevalent in sports like college football where the same thing caused a lot of rage between UCLA and USC. Sure, some teams share colors, but with 30 teams in MLB, that’s pretty much unavoidable. Now with gear that spans the rainbow, it looks more like the candy aisle at 7-Eleven than a baseball game.

Maybe these Technicolor hats are just a way for die-hard fans to wear team gear that matches their outfits no matter what they’re wearing. After all, you can’t wear navy and red seven days a week unless you’re a cartoon character. But I think where this rubs me the wrong way is that baseball is all about history. If you watch Baseball Tonight for five minutes, you’ll hear things like ‘that was the first time a player hit two home runs in his first appearance against his former team,’ and ‘a pitcher hasn’t had that many balks in a season since Dave Stewart had 16 in 1988.’ It’s about numbers and streaks and history; and all these crazy colors have nothing to do with any of that. If they kept the hats to historical and city-relevant colors it’d be pretty cool, but colors are so important to team identities, it feels like a neon orange Yankee hat is still doing more harm than good.

The Olsen Twins go Olsenboye

Olsenboye: the Olsen Twins' first attempt at cross-dressing.

by Mars Riley

Some things you should know about me: I am not a teenage girl. I rarely wear branded clothing. I do not shop at J.C. Penney. I dislike cupcakes. And I am not a fan of the Olsen Twins (Although, I do think one of them is kind of cute, but I’m not sure which one it is).

The reason I am pointing these things out is to make it clear that I am plainly not the demographic for the new Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen clothing line, Olsenboye. It’s all about girls, but we know what girls think about all the time so they got that word in there. Actually Olsenboye is apparently an olde Olsen family name and the immigration officer at Ellis Island probably dropped the -boye because it took another two seconds to write.

The “O” in the logo is a brush-stroked Aldermaston peace sign. But we’re not talking nuclear disarmament at J. C. Penney. It merely points to a “travel theme” ­ with each season being inspired by the youth fashions of different cities from around the world.

“Mary-Kate and I watch current trends and see our partnership with J.C. Penney as an opportunity to add something unique to the marketplace,” says Ashley Olsen. The mix-and-match collection includes jeans, dresses, skirts, shorts, jackets, handbags, and shoes, and will retail from $20 – $50 with sizes ranging from 0 to 15.

“It’s very fun, fashion driven, trendy and wholesome at the same time,” Liz Sweeney, executive vice president of J.C. Penney, said. “It’s really important that Olsenboye serves lots of girls.”

Since the target demographic is “wholesome” girls, Olsenboye and J.C. Penney have geared their promotional campaign directly to them. This week in New York, they are promoting the brand with an Olsenboye “treat truck.” Customers will be able to be the first to purchase select merchandise and will receive a cupcake, balloon and pin. Oh My! They will then be asked to participate online by posting photos on the Olsenboye website of themselves in Olsenboye clothes. There will also be a huge push on FaceBook, Twitter and the jcp.com/teen website.

The Olsen girls get around. They had a line at Walmart that tanked, but they picked themselves up to sell two high-priced fashion lines, The Row and Elizabeth and James, to Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus, respectively. And to put the icing on the cake, they were recently inducted into the Council of Fashion Designers of America (a rare achievement for celebrity designers, the only other one being Diddy/Puff Daddy/P Diddy/Sean Combs/…). Way to go girls.

Quick Hits: Naming and Branding News

Coming to a store near you: tiny cans of Coca-Cola.

Later this year you can expect to start seeing the 7.5-ounce Coca-Cola mini in the soda aisle next to its larger counterparts. The diminutive coke will have an identical ingredient list and will likely sell for 50 cents a can.

In a recent guest column in the New York Times Op-Ed pages, musician and activist Bono, gives his take on how to rebrand America. In short, “Don’t blow it.”

The much anticipated release of Barnes & Noble’s e-reader Nook reveals a Kindle rival with features as catchy as its name. Naming gurus, including our own Danny Altman, think it’s a cool name, but the bar is low.

What happens when a brand’s portfolio of products outgrows its naming system? There are lessons to be learned by the confusion surrounding the numbering system of BlackBerry smartphones.

The Staples Center will stay the Staples Center forever, after a new agreement with the sports and entertainment company AEG, which gives the office supply store chain exclusive naming rights to the venue indefinitely.

Microsoft celebrates its launch of Windows 7 today, and some are questioning the naming math behind the operating system. How exactly did we get to 7?

When designer jeans are your True Religion

Even Grams will want the feel of Diesel's new britches.

by Jeffery Racheff

There are two ways to define a pair of denim jeans. The first says they are nothing more than sturdy lifestyle-and-work pants, made from reasonably cheap material, that go just as well with Motörhead t-shirts as they do with bow ties. But the second definition takes a different approach. This angle sees jeans as fashion statements, as status symbols and as worthy substitutes for car payments.

Popularized as protection from the elements for gold-miners in the 19th century, denim jeans were originally meant to be durable, versatile and, most importantly, cheap. Now, however, designer brand jeans can cost more than your petty pan of gold. A pair of 7 For All Mankind (for either sex) will run you anywhere from $150 – $250, while a pair of True Religion pants can cost almost $400. Yes, $400… for jeans! I know this isn’t anything new, but I guess the shock still hasn’t worn off. Then, of course, there are the jeans that sell for the price of cars. Escada’s couture line, for example, sold a pair for $10,000 that was encrusted from hip-to-hem with Swarovski crystals. While this may be an extreme case, there are still those who believe the name on the back of their trousers is as much of a status symbol as that leaping wildcat on their Jag. So while we might gag and choke at the thought of jeans that run over $1,000, some find the price tag to be completely worth it.

Needless to say, denim has come a long way in the last 150 years, both in fashion and cost. But what about the names of the brands themselves? How does this factor into a consumer’s decision to shell out top-dollar for clothing? The way I see it, there exist three major categories of names for designer jeans, each of which aims to promote a feeling or a story for the potential buyer and, consequently, the potential wearer.

Designer Names

Ralph Lauren, Calvin Klein, Dolce & Gabbana, Marc Jacobs… Jeans with designer names on them promote the idea that they were crafted from the individual imagination and personality of a big name fashion designer. There’s a more personal feeling in thinking that someone who gets paid to have good taste specifically designed these jeans for you. Unfortunately, when you say you are “wearing Ed Hardy” it sounds like you’ve just made out with a mechanic, when in actuality you’ve only purchased fancy dungarees from his bedazzled tool chest.

Pants with a Conscience

Rock & Republic, True Religion, 7 For All Mankind, Citizens of Humanity, Sanctuary… Put simply, they’re more than just jeans. These names convey a participation in something deeper, as if buying a pair of Citizens of Humanity marks you as a human being who is altruistic and part of a mission much larger than denim. I can’t help but imagine that consumers who have the money to buy these kinds of jeans don’t feel too bad about the idea of being seen as charitable or worldly either. Hey, if all it costs to be worldly is $300 and a trip to a denim bar, sign me up. In all, they seem to be part of a growing trend that views the concept of philanthropy as fashionable. Who knows, maybe this  eases some of the guilt of spending so much money on jeans.

A Worker’s Attitude

Diesel, Earnest Sewn, Paper Denim Cloth, Joe’s, Paige, Lucky… This is the wild card category — it’s full of little monikers that people find intriguing because they’re so vague and open-ended. In the men’s aisle, brands like Lucky and Diesel make you think of simplicity and experience—a 5 o’clock shadowy ruggedness and that signifies these jeans have been put to use. Maybe the wearer has been painting the barn or working under the Camaro all afternoon. This is akin to the reason people buy pre-ripped, bleach-speckled jeans (True story: my stepfather once returned a pair of upper-priced denim jeans after discovering there was a rip in the pant leg. He was aghast when he found people actually want to pay that much money for trousers with holes in them). If working in a halogen-filled, textile-upholstered cubicle all day long doesn’t put enough wear in your jeans, you can always pay to have them pre-worn for you. After all, working in an office park is taxing and this should be reflected in your jeans.

Of course, as most fans of designer jeans will tell you, it doesn’t matter at all what name the big-ticket britches carry—it’s all about the fit. More expensive brands, the story goes, just have better fabric and more considered cuts that are more flattering to your lower half. So if you’ve got the money for it, why not splurge for comfort? Let’s just hope you don’t get spoiled with all the fancy perks and then have to resort to plain old Levi’s again. We wouldn’t want you to have to wear sandpaper and cardboard like the rest of the us.

Dodge loses its horns

by Mars Riley

Earlier this year, as some of you might know, Fiat bought a 35 percent stake in Chrysler and plans to become the majority shareholder after some pesky government loans are repaid.  One of Fiats big goals with Chrysler is to make the line smaller and more efficient with their European building platform. On the opposite end of Chrysler’s efficiency spectrum is Dodge—which Chrysler has owned since 1928. For the last 28 years Chrysler’s most successful brand of pickup truck has been known as the Dodge Ram. But earlier this month, in an effort to create some differentiation, Dodge ditched its horns and decided to let Ram fend for itself. They’ll still be sold under the same roof, but as far as marketing is concerned, the Dodge/Ram relationship is over.

There are arguments on both sides about which name, Dodge or Ram, is more connected to the pickups. The Dodge name has a lot of equity in the truck world and playing around with that equity is risky business. From a literal perspective, the Ram name might be better suited to trucks: smaller cars are better at dodging and bigger trucks are better at ramming. While both Dodge cars and Ram trucks will be sold at the same dealerships, a lot of pickup truck fans are still upset about the split.

In some ways I get their grief. It is odd to say “Ram” by itself. Your mouth senses something is missing. It wants to say “DODGE RAM!” in a deep voice … with a growl, maybe even a twang. Makes you feel macho just saying it. Saying “RAM!” by itself in the same way sounds psychotic and might make someone want to call the police.

From a business perspective, creating the split achieves a few things. First, when Dodge starts to roll out more fuel-efficient models, ‘Ram’ won’t mess up their MPG stats. Secondly, there is speculation that they might be separating Ram to pitch the strong-selling truck line to another automaker. Although it may be understandable in the current financial climate to do what needs to be done to survive, they are running the risk of alienating the loyal Dodge Ram customers.

In an interview the new President and CEO of the Ram brand, Fred Diaz Jr., said, “At the end of the day, the Ram will still have some Dodge DNA to it. Anything that’s a real, true truck is part of Ram and the Ram brand going forward.“

When asked about what elevating the Ram brand name will mean to the marketing of the pickups, he said, “That’s another area I need to delve into and figure out. I certainly can’t see us marketing a Ram Ram.” Rumor has it that Ram will position itself as designed to tow ATVs, snowmobiles and boats. Since Ford and Chevy are often promoted as being “work” trucks, Ram might be angling to be the the “sporty” truck. Rams can be sporty, right? Look at the Saint Louis Rams. Sure, 0-5 isn’t too sporty, but the season is far from over. Hopefully rams of all varieties can look forward to better days in the future.

Downtown South America: What’s on tap?

What's wrong with this picture?

by Alex Altman, reporting on location in Quito, Ecuador

They say it’s not a good idea to drink water out of the tap in Ecuador. Well I suppose you could, but it depends on your tolerance for typhoid bacteria and other waterborne critters.  My gringo stomach certainly can’t handle it, and I’m speaking from experience. So I, along with everyone else in the country who can afford to do so, buy copious amounts of bottled water.  (Your other option is boiling tap water, which is fine but you have to wait a long time and it tastes like swimming pool.)  Given the fact that people have to drink bottled water for their safety, you’d think there would be some variety in the bottled water market. But that’s just not how things work down here. You really have two options. You can buy Tesalia, which is spring water drawn from a particularly salty spring, or All Natural, a filtered tap that tastes like—nothing. Naturally, I buy the All Natural variety in 1-gallon jugs.

Not only does All Natural taste better, it brings bottled water labeling to new heights.  Forget the standard mountaintop or water droplet logo.  How about something different that Ecuadorian customers can actually relate to, like a blue-eyed baby, laying on his back, going bottoms up on a bottle of All Natural?  Sounds natural to me.  Sure, the logo raises some interesting questions, like: How’d the baby get the top off? And, how’s he not drowning? But the image is at least memorable and the product is certainly better that a salty alternative. If you forget the name, you can say, “Pick me up a bottle of the drowning baby water,” and everyone will know exactly what you’re talking about.