Craft of Writing: product positioning or creative allusion

[shalanna]

I'm not the first to invent products to use in my fiction so that I won't have any product placements, and so that the work doesn't become dated because of the references (or be a turnoff to those who support competing products.) I'm not worried about infringing on trademarks, although this is an issue for some advertisers--they actually run quarter-page ads in Writer's Digest (or at least they used to--I haven't read it in a while) saying that we should not say "Kleenex" even in fiction when we mean "facial tissue." C'mon. But I don't want to plug a particular product, so I come up with one whose name suggests what it is.

A New York Times movie reviewer recently commented on this:

"Before product placement became a lucrative business, movie studios mostly kept well-known brands off the screen. They generally considered the appearance of real products to be too great a distraction from the escapist worlds they conjured up for moviegoers at neighborhood cinemas. In _The Thrill of It All,_ Doris Day pitched Happy Soap, to James Garner's dismay. [This was an invented product.]

In films and books, products almost always carried made-up names. The practice was prevalent enough to be parodied in Warner Brothers cartoons, where every product bore the brand name Acme."

Read the article in its entirety.

Therefore, I do not understand why many beta readers freak out when they encounter my made-up products. It must be that they started reading books written after Big Steve King and others popularized the idea of "verisimilitude through product placement" and chick lit made it _de rigeur_ to drop designer names every other paragraph. Funny how "a distraction" becomes the norm, and afterwards, to do otherwise is "a distraction."

I don't believe in product positioning, and I don't think it actually gives verisimilitude to mention real products (Stephen King or Danielle Steel started that trend, and then chick lit really glommed on to it.) It's just that people are so wedded to the idea of branding these days, they almost expect brand names. I wish we could shake that trend out. Donald E. Westlake (grandmaster of mysteries) uses made-up brand names, and I'm sure I get that from him. Or from Herman Wouk.

It used to be the norm. There's a precedent. If I don't want to promote one particular product, and I can think of fun product names, what's wrong with that?

Well, it bugs some percentage of the readership. That has to be a consideration.

In other words, I'd like to stick with made-up brand names if possible. However, I'll admit that some of mine are a little in-your-face. Or just plain weird. I think they're funny, but maybe I should come up with subtler names. Would that bother readers as much? Who can say?

Comments

Those Fickle Brand Names

[dennis-havens.livejournal.com]

This is something I never thought about before. I've had a stable of fictive products ever since my early teens, when my friends and I used to produce our own "radio programs" on dull Saturday afternoons, saving our immortal works with my ancient reel-to-reel tape recorder. (I'm talkin' 1952 or thereabouts, kiddies.) Of course immortaliity was flexible: it lasted until I needed that particular tape to record something else.

I do remember some of the brands I invented, though. There was Look Out! brand tuna, whose ad was done in a crescendo of "Look Outs!" that invariably sent my mother to my room, asking if anyone had been hurt. Look Out! tuna's claim to fame was that it contained the special ingredient, Mal de Mer. (Yes, I guess I was always this way.)

There was Rip-Rite toilet paper, too. No explanation needed. There was a new auto, the Norwegian Fjord. Pit Stop, now an upscale ladies' deodorant in the pages of MUKO, began life under the same name as a product for auto racers and other men with sweaty jobs.

Last and definitely least were two separate-but-related skin products whose names and purposes shall remain unknown. If you really want to know, Shalanna, leave me e-mail and I will tell you by equally private means.

I don't make much of an issue of brand names in my books, preferring to save such things for MUKO. If someone is driving a car in a given scene, I try to choose a suitable make and model. In AUTOPSY ON A LIVING CORPSE Diana Lemmon rents a Lincoln Continental while in Las Vegas, the CIA man tailing her drives an anonymous-looking Toyota, and Jimmy Polk owns a new red Thunderbird (which now dates the book), a 1934 Cadillac Phaeton, and a Jeep never further identified. In WITHOUT A PRAYER the Hirsches fly home from Chicago on a 737 departing from Midway Airport, thus saying without saying that the airline had to be Southwest. Madison Perreira drove a new Oldsmobile station wagon in FLASH FLOOD WARNING, but with the demise of the Oldsmobile as a brand, that's neither here nor there now. Irene Triplett, my Phyllis character in SHOULD AULD ACQUAINTANCE, drove around in a beat-up old Plymouth Horizon . . . and, in my first effort, Frank Richardson bought a new 1938 Dodge coupe, but then he was only in the past due to a time machine.

Based on this, I suppose my personal choice is to go for the verisimilitude. The country of Esperantujo in MUKO is not real, so I go for the brand naming gusto with a cigarette brand, Kalumno, which means "calumny" or "lie" in Esperanto. But I think in a "serious" story, the use of made-up names could very well be distracting.

So pop a Singulto (hiccough) beer or a martini made with Blue Nightmare gin, and watch "Execution of the Week" on Esperantujan TV.
But if you're trying to sell a book, don't take chances by not doing it the way other authors -- your competitors -- do it.

Dennis

Re: Those Fickle Brand Names

[dpeterfreund.livejournal.com]

Interesting post. I never thought of "glomming" by using brand names, though I do get annoyed at the chick lit where they seem to be name dropping in every other paragraph. In genreal, I use brand names when I think it is a characterization situation. Saying "her Prius" is a hell of a lot snappier than saying her "trendy compact gas-electric hybrid" y'know?

However, that being said, I've made it sort of an "in joke" to change the names of everything at the school as well as all the campus landmarks. It's funny (to me) because Yale makes a habit of suing anytime someone uses their name without permission, and it was a joke how in the movie the Skulls you never actually heard the word "yale." So despite the fact that I say "The GAP" and "Starbucks" and "Converse All-Stars" I change the main "brand" in the book.

Oh, and my copyeditor lowercased Xerox. How weird is that?

Re: Those Fickle Brand Names

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

See, I would have had this kooky notion that I should change "Prius" a little, just enough that those who know what a Prius hybrid car is would say, "That's supposed to be like a Prius," but I would have made it a word that implied, say, priapism. *ducking* Maybe this tendency of mine is related to puns somehow and should be routed out as fiercely as pun-routing ever was. *grin*

But see, you changed the names at the school, and now people familiar with the New Haven campus will be the ones to get the in-jokes, and the rest of 'em will all think that's what the cafeteria (for instance) is really called. (grin) I think that's a lot more fun than actually naming the stuff.

I would have Post-It[TM] flagged her on Xerox, or just STETted her. I think that Xerox defends their brand name against becoming generic pretty aggressively (they're one of the ones who advertise in WD), so if you're saying "She Xeroxed it for him," that should be uppercase, if you want Xerox Corp to be happy. But of course you have to choose your battles.

On the other hand, I know an author (hi Pamela) who had a little STET rubber stamp made up for herself and a couple of others in her critique circle. *smile*

Re: Those Fickle Brand Names

[dennis-havens.livejournal.com]

Having been raised as an Episcopalian, the phrase "moderation in all things, including moderation" resonates in my head constantly. I suppose that without even thinking about it that useful tenet -- reinforced by the Duchess of Windsor's immortal "anyone can drink two martinis, no one can drink three" -- has affected my writing. Whether this is good or bad remains to be seen.

It strikes me that the brand-name usage under discussion should be a character-driven device rather than something more all-pervasive, unless your book is a first-person narrative done by a shopping-addicted 20-year-old (or an heiress of independent means who uses potential lovers' choices in clothing and men's cologne brands as a way of determining their suitability.)

This, to me, is legitimate use, if not overdone. After all, we need all the tools at our disposal. Brand-naming seems to have two valid uses: helping to set a character in the reader's memory, and, as you pointed out, making the act of reading more comfortable. In my own life I don't refer to my car as "the Subaru," but a very few of my close friends know that its name is "Sluggo." If it were in a novel of my devising, I might at some point use its legitimate handle (early in the book, one would hope) and describe it as a maroon '92 Subaru Legacy wagon whose odometer is about to turn 200,000 miles, surely too soon to worry about its dependability. Then, throughout the book, it would be "my car" in first person, "his car" in third. As to other brand-name use, he (or I) might become aware of a new person in the room by way of a whiff of Kouros (a pricey men's scent) or Joy (a far more expensive women's fragrance, probably worn these days mostly by well-off ladies of 45 or above). That saves some expository writing and gives the reader a very, very brief character sketch as well.

There are a million such uses and devices. From real life, my daughter, who is in every other way a strong Liberal with environmentalist and social concerns one would expect to find in such a person, chooses to own and drive a 1994 Cadillac Eldorado. Why this unexpected quirk? Getting to know her better (which is kind of the point of writing fiction), you'd learn on one hand that she's 44 years old but looks fifteen years younger. You'd discover that she works for a giant U.S. corporation in a job of some responsibility. You'd find out that the has three children, 22, 19 and 5. Five? This is a little unusual, right? Is there a tie-in between the behemoth Cadillac and the 5-year-old, 17 years older than his elder sibling? Did she want to have one child with her second husband? That's a valid question, and it makes sense. Now where would the interest in this character sketch, taken from life (but deliberately incomplete for the sake of my daughter's privacy), be if I said she drove a (make up your own fictitious auto brand)?

Now if I had a character watching late-night TV I would have no qualms about inventing nonexistent "not available in stores" gadgets selling for $19.95 -- with special bonus gifts included if you call within the next ten minutes. That would be appropriate, at least from my point of view.

Those fragrances I mentioned above: If the scene were set at Wal-Mart, the narrator might well think, "I got a sudden infusion of a men's scent, Plow the South Forty. His wife wore a complementary perfume, incompletely masked by a liberal application of OhMiGawd deodorant, made for ladies but strong enough for goats."

That gets irony into the mix as well as telling you that the narrator doesn't often find himself prowling the aisles of Wally World.

Try what you like and see what seems to work for you. If it's true to your overall message, you'll do fine. As for Yele, the powers-that-be there ought to be able to find other things to keep their lawyers busy.

Dennis

Re: Those Fickle Brand Names

[shalanna.livejournal.com]

I'll take this under advisement. You're probably right that I need to be like the other people. (As a confirmed nonconformist, that's usually the furthest thing from my mind. I was brought up to think that originality was the pinnacle of achievement. So were all those performance artists in the 80s who jumped into vats of cottage cheese and sang a song about naughty bits, though.

I think what bugs people most is that the brand names are so CLOSE. It makes them crazy thinking it's a typo. . . .

[coneycat.livejournal.com]

I only really object to the made-up brand names when they're "Look at me!!" clever-clever. I know so little about brand names that I'm generally easy to fool, but in Little Rituals you had someone addicted to a candy you referred to as "Spittles." [a] Obvious Skittles reference, [b] in no way necessary to the story you were telling (as most brand names are unnecessary unless the character is in the world of high fashion or something), and [c] YUUUUUCCKKKKK.

I figure, if the brand name is necessary for story related purposes (and I've never written such a story, so I really don't know) you might as well do the research and use the real names. A lot of stories date anyway, even without the fashion references.

If you need to make one up, have at 'er. But as a reader I get annoyed very quickly when I run inrto made-up names that seem to be more about the author waving her arms and saying "Aren't I clever!" than trying to tell me a story that matters to her.

But as Spinal Tap said, there's such a fine line between clever and stupid. YMMV.