Viswanathan K's Thoughts

Many brands in the US have, well, misspelled names. Like Dunkin’ Donuts (not Doughnuts), Froot Loops, Cheez-It, Flickr (not Flicker) or Tumblr (not Tumbler). If you attribute this to American stupidity, you’d be as wrong as you are contemptuous. In case of tech companies, it’s because they’ve often been founded by kids in college. Nancy Friedman, a branding consultant: “Professional name developers usually advise against spelling or punctuation that requires repeated explanation, won’t translate into print, and doesn’t contribute to actual distinctiveness—but many companies and products are named by entrepreneurs who don’t seek, or follow, professional advice.” In other cases, it’s because of what Vanitha Swaminathan, who teaches at the Katz Graduate School of Business says: “One way in which brands can be memorable is to kind of switch or change something about the spelling so that it stands out in your memory and it doesn’t get lost in the shuffle.” And sometimes, i

When someone forms snap judgments of people based on appearance, we know it’s a lot worse than judging a book by its cover. Someone (nick)named Happy on some site made an interesting point on this topic: “Stereotypes are wrong of course. But brands are good.” An interesting question: are stereotypes and brands two sides of the same coin? Happy goes on to say that when people dress a certain way, willy nilly, “they are creating a brand for themselves”: “There's a nerd brand. There's a metro-sexual brand. There's a jock brand, a cheerleader brand, a gothic brand…a gangster brand.” The next step in Happy’s argument is what makes this topic so interesting. When people see someone looking or behaving a certain way, they apply the duck test : “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” Now given that everyone knows this is how most people think, then Happy tells people who (deliberately) project a certain i