Happy St. Patrick’s Day from the Scarcliff | Salvador team. ‘Tis a fine thing to be Irish.
Tom Fishburne’s latest cartoon is on the subject of product naming. Check it out:
Sega Europe is polling the world (or a reasonable sample thereof) to name the new alien baddies in the next iteration of its legendary Sonic The Hedgehog franchise. My vote? The Darkmood.
Sonic is cool and all, but he’s no Crash Bandicoot.
Lakers’ owner Jerry Buss on brand experience:
“Right after I bought the team, I used to go into this little lounge in Santa Monica. The owner was also musical director for MGM, and they used to perform musicals there late at night, it was just fantastic,” he says. “Just before they would start, everyone would start shouting, ‘Showtime! Showtime!’ I remember thinking, this is how I wanted people to feel about their team.”
Victoria’s Secret CEO Sharen Turney feels her lingerie brand has become “too sexy” for its own good:
“We have moved off of our brand heritage,” she said in a conference call with analysts. “We use the word ’sexy’ a lot and really have forgotten the ultra-feminine.”
Turney said the brand’s original storyline was of a to-the-manor-born Londoner named Victoria whose lacey underthings, we assume, were her little secret. But in recent years, Victoria became known as simply “Vicky,” and she had no qualms about flaunting her sex appeal.
George Lucas reminds us of the importance of a backstory:
Lucas has been described as a frustrated architect, but to draft his dream academy he needed more than blueprints. “He created a story for the ranch,” Bay says. “He created a history. It belonged to a cattle rancher. Each building was added at a certain time and built in a certain style. There was a winery, for instance, but then it burned down at a certain point in time and was rebuilt in an Art Deco style. This room we’re in, it belonged to the rancher’s daughter She had brown hair and green eyes and went to the University of Arizona and she couldn’t get horses out of her blood.”
Branding turns out to be older than we thought:
In “Prehistories of Commodity Branding,” author David Wengrow challenges the widespread assumption that branding did not become an important force in social and economic life until the Industrial Revolution. Wengrow presents compelling evidence that labels on ancient containers, which have long been assumed to be simple identifiers, as well as practices surrounding the production and distribution of commodities, actually functioned as branding strategies. Furthermore, these strategies have deep cultural origins and cognitive foundations, beginning in the civilizations of Egypt and Iraq thousands of years ago.
Via ScienceDaily
An intriguing conversation between the author Will Self ( a self-described flâneur) and the geneticist Spencer Wells (who has been busy tracing prehistoric migrations via DNA analysis), courtesy of Jon Howard:
We will be closed this Monday, January 21st, in observance of Martin Luther King Day:
“Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted.”
Martin Luther King, Jr., Strength To Love, 1963
Our July naming quote of the month:
“Proper names are poetry in the raw. Like all poetry they are untranslatable.”
W. H. Auden, Anglo-American Poet
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