Brand Naming

Introduction

A few years ago, Ron Marshall, owner of a small marketing firm in Spring-field, Missouri, decided to count how many brands and ads he saw in a single day. That morning, he woke up to his Sony alarm clock, got dressed and put on his Nike shoes, and drank a cup of Folgers coffee. After making note of those brands—and 484 others—he gave up counting. That was before he’d finished breakfast.

By most estimates, we see thousands of brand names every day. The brands may vary in different parts of the world—Li-Ning instead of Nike, say, or Nescafé instead of Folgers—but the pattern is the same. Next time you open your medicine cabinet or kitchen pantry, try counting, and you’ll start to get an idea of just how inundated we all are.

And yet, ...