Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Adventures in Branding (again): Note that my previous post, lo these many months ago, was about something that might become a product name. Call it a hobby but I played at doing branding work (for pay) until about two years ago, and it's still of interest to me. The occasional work I did was for a Korean branding company. They reliably thrilled and frightened me with the product names they thought might be viable in the US and elsewhere, such as Millient (cigarettes) and Nebbis (a sports beverage). Usually, my job was to collect data in the form of attitude surveys and warn them away from obvious English-based dangers. Much depends of course on the the usual variables: product, target consumer, location. But somehow I don't think Nebbis will ever have much of a run in the US, at least in places where Yiddishisms are understood.
Today I came across this title in the Quality Paperback Book Club's mail solicitation:
The QPB Mammoth Book of Erotica
This being Northern California and all, I have witnessed the Constant Variety of Sexuality on a regular, but healthy, basis. Still, the co-occurrence of "mammoth" and "erotica" in the same noun phrase was a rare find in what is becoming an exhausted field.
The possibilities of this title are considerable, foremost the question of how one has erotic experiences with extinct animals. The few sites where frozen specimens are occasionally unearthed are hard to reach, evenby Land Rover. The Museum of Natural History offers some solace, but the guards must be bribed. There's also that wonderful dampening effect "mammoth" has on "erotica", like "laxative" or "petroleum" before "chocolate mousse". Or maybe I'm just out of it. As America gets bigger (and presumably dumber, such that an editor would let such a title go to press), as de rigeur tattoos and pubic coiffure fall by the way, "mammoth sex" might be the porn of tomorrow.
posted by stefan 6:38 PM
