Beach Boys’ guitarist Al Jardine called me today and left a message on my home phone to say that Tony Bennett had changed his show time and “come on down to Big Sur today it should be a great party! ” He left his home number, so I called him back to accept. Unfortunately he intended the message for someone named Scott. My name isn’t Scott.

Gash, Chubby Hubby and Urban Decay are all names that a focus group would flag as “too negative”, yet all are successful. That’s because focus group responses are by definition literal. Consumers are not literalists, not consumers of any kind in any business sector. Names are processed emotionally, in the context provided by the corporation. Philly.com goes into detail:

What color is Sin? How would Riptide Rush taste? What does Ionic smell like?

If you’ve spent an extra moment in a store aisle wondering, that was probably good for the marketers of Nars Sin blush, Riptide Rush Gatorade and Degree Ionic antiperspirant, according to new research from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School.

The researchers found that, in general, surprising or ambiguous names for colors and flavors made consumers – in this case, college students – more likely to prefer a product.

Wharton marketing professor Barbara Kahn’s theory is that when consumers spend more time thinking about a product, they form more connections to it and end up liking it better. Trusting souls that they are, shoppers believe marketers are trying to tell them something important with a name, an assumption she traces to the way people fill in the gaps in confusing conversations. Plus, people enjoy figuring out what a name like Dublin Mudslide (Irish cream liqueur and chocolate ice cream made by Ben & Jerry’s) or Gash (dark metallic red eyeshadow by Urban Decay) means. Their positive feelings transfer to the product.

“Some of these weird names were actually little puzzles,” Kahn said, “so if you thought about it, you could get it.”

“Their positive feelings transfer to the product”. And all those literal, negative dictionary definitions have done their job in creating engagement, and then faded away.

There are lots of branding companies you can go to when you need a visual identity. They have portfolios detailing the logo work they’ve done, explaining the ideas that are conveyed by each logo element, what the choice of colors conveys, the importance of a logo, how it can help propel your unique brand message and achieve separation from your competitors, etc.

We would argue that you can tell a lot about what a branding firm really believes in based on the work they’ve done in presenting their own brand.

Landor, Interbrand, Pentagram and Siegal & Gale all wax poetic about the power of the logos they created for others, yet they’ve all chosen to go gentle into that good night, sans logo.

Instead they each opted for a type treatment.

Note how each visual identity demonstrates their respective understanding of the power of visual identiy to communicate the unique qualities of their individual brands.

We think they’ve each succeeded in communicating that understanding brilliantly.