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Is this kind of branding a thing in other countries too (details inside)

Asked by Mimishu1995 (23628points) January 22nd, 2021

I’ve noticed a very strange trend in product names in my country lately, particularly with products that are advertised online (Facebook, Youtube…). So basically a company would give their product a really catchy name that has little to do with its function, and no one could guess what the product is and what it does without looking at it and its description. As a real example: a product called “Key-chan”, which is a rubber keychain that has the shape of a cute character (“chan” being a wordplay of “chain”, and also a Japanese word for “little one”). Another example from the same company: Cyan Intelligence, which is a line of bag and pencil cases with cyan color (and “Intelligence” comes from some tagline on Facebook saying something like “the wise color of cyan”)

Those are the ones that I managed to guess the meaning based on their arbitrary references. It gets extremely confusing with names that have nothing to do with anything whatsoever. A case in point is the names of the service packages of a certain insurance company I talked about (“Confident Life package”, “Safe Life package”, “Optimistic Life package”) I couldn’t figure out which each package offered even after digging up their website. A more recent example is the names of some service packages of a beauty salon advertised on Facebook. They are called something like “Beauty package”, “Safety package”, “Money package”, “Wonderful package”... And as far as I can tell, the differences between all of them are the prices and the number of services offered. But how in the world can I know which one is which just by hearing their names?

I just don’t understand why this kind of branding is becoming so popular here. A name of a product should be something memorable, and people have to immediately know what the name is referred to and what the product does. Why go for something that only serves to confuse your customers?

And it seems to me that those kinds of names are used more by online businesses than traditional businesses (businesses that sell products advertised on TV and sold in physical stores). So maybe it has something to do with the Internet?

Is this a thing in where you live too?

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